Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 71, May 2019, Pages 123-135
Consciousness and Cognition

Active control as evidence in favor of sense of ownership in the moving Virtual Hand Illusion

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2019.04.003Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Active control does not increase sense of ownership in a morphological congruent hand.

  • Active control increases sense of ownership in morphological incongruent conditions.

  • Incongruent control of a morphological congruent limb decreases sense of ownership.

  • A Bayesian framework consistent with these results is presented.

Abstract

The sense of ownership, the feeling that our body belongs to ourselves, relies on multiple sources of sensory information. Among these sources, the contribution of visuomotor information is still debated. We tested the effect of active control in the sense of ownership in the moving Virtual Hand Illusion. Participants reported sense of ownership and sense of agency over a virtual arm in which we manipulated the morphological congruence of the hand and the visuomotor information. We found that congruent active control enhanced and maintained the reported sense of ownership over a hand that appeared detached from the body, but not in a morphological congruent limb. Also, incongruent active control, achieved by adding noise to the trajectory of the movement, decreased both reported sense of agency and ownership. Overall, our results are consistent with a framework in which active control acts as evidence for eliciting a sense of ownership.

Keywords

Sense of ownership
Morphological congruence
Visuomotor information
Active control
Sense of agency
Bayesian framework

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