Embodied Precision: Intranasal Oxytocin Modulates Multisensory Integration (original) (raw)
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Quantifying body ownership information processing and perceptual bias in the rubber hand illusion
Bodily illusions have fascinated humankind for centuries, and researchers have studied them to learn about the perceptual and neural processes that underpin multisensory channels of bodily awareness. The influential rubber hand illusion (RHI) has been used to study changes in the sense of body ownership: how a limb is perceived to belong to one’s body, which is a fundamental building block in many theories of bodily awareness, self-consciousness, embodiment, and self-representation. However, the methods used to quantify perceptual changes in bodily illusions — including the RHI — have mainly relied on subjective questionnaires and rating scales, and the degree to which such illusory sensations depend on sensory information processing has been difficult to test directly. Here we introduce a signal detection theory (SDT) framework to study the sense of body ownership in the RHI. We provide evidence that the illusion is associated with changes in body ownership sensitivity that depend ...
The role of expectation in multisensory body representation – neural evidence
European Journal of Neuroscience, 2017
Sensory events contribute to body ownership, the feeling that the body belongs to me. However, the encoding of sensory events is not only reactive, but also proactive in that our brain generates prediction about forthcoming stimuli. In previous studies, we have shown that prediction of sensory events is a sufficient condition to induce the sense of body ownership. In this study, we investigated the underlying neural mechanisms. Participants were seated with their right arm resting upon a table just below another smaller table. Hence, the real hand was hidden from the participant's view and a life‐sized rubber model of a right hand was placed on the small table in front of them. Participants observed a wooden plank while approaching – without touching – the rubber hand. We measured the phenomenology of the illusion by means of questionnaire. Neural activity was recorded by means of near‐infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Results showed higher activation of multisensory parietal corti...
Rubber Hand Illusion: Evidence for a multisensory integration of proprioception
Avances en Psicología Latinoamericana, 2017
This review seeks to describe a multisensory integration hypothesis for proprioception through the description of different Rubber Hand Illusion (rhi) experimental settings. rhi is a paradigm created in 1998 to explore the relation between visual and tactile sensory systems. The task involves a synchronous stroking, using a paintbrush, of one of a subject's hands occluded from his vision, and a prosthetic rubber hand located in front of the subject. Instructed to look at the rubber hand, the subject starts to feel as if the rubber hand is his own hand after approximately half a minute, which is to say that the illusion produces a feeling of ownership of the rubber hand. Additional research over the last 15 years has widely explored these results, illustrating the dynamic functions of the brain and body sensory systems, as well as shedding light on the bases of amputee rehabilitation and different types of paresthesia. The review is structured around three topics: (1) the definition, limits, and scope of rhi; (2) the physiological and neurocognitive evidence backing rhi; and (3) the use of action based rhi experimental settings. The paper concludes that rhi is a salient example of a neuroscientific trend towards an integrated account of body, brain, and perceptual space. The discovery of the illusion has also provided an alternative context for the study of proprioception and related brain dynamics in normal subjects.
Rubber Hand Illusion survives Ventral Premotor area inhibition: A rTMS study
Neuropsychologia, 2018
The sense of body ownership is a fundamental feature that refers to the ability to recognize our body as our own, allowing us to interact properly with the outside world. Usually, it is explored by means of the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) during which a dummy hand is incorporated in the mental representation of one's own body throughout a multisensory (visuo-tactile) integration mechanism. Particular attention has been paid to the neurofunctional counterparts of this mechanism highlighting the pivotal role of an occipito-parieto-frontal network involving the Ventral Premotor area (PMv). To date, the specific role of the PMv in generating the sense of ownership is still unknown. In this study, we aimed at exploring the role of PMv in generating and experiencing the RHI. Off-line repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) was applied to a group of 24 healthy participants whilst changes in proprioceptive judgment and self-reported illusion sensations were collected and analysed separately. The PMv was not directly implicated in generating the sense of ownership. Indeed, its inhibition affected the explicit detection of the visuo-tactile congruence without interfering with the illusion experience itself. We hypothesized that the conscious visuo-tactile congruence detection may be independent from the conscious illusion experience. Also, our results support the view that the RHI grounds on a complex interaction between bottom-up and top-down processes, as the visuo-tactile integration per se may be not sufficient to trigger the subjective illusion.
Psihologija, 2022
Many studies have reported that bottom-up multisensory integration of visual, tactile, and proprioceptive information can distort our sense of body-ownership, producing rubber hand illusion (RHI). There is less evidence about when and how the body-ownership is distorted in the brain during RHI. To examine whether this illusion effect occurs preattentively at an early stage of processing, we monitored the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) component (the index of automatic deviant detection) and N2 (the index for conflict monitoring). Participants first performed an RHI elicitation task in a synchronous or asynchronous setting and then finished a passive visual oddball task in which the deviant stimuli were unrelated to the explicit task. A significant interaction between Deviancy (deviant hand vs. standard hand) and Group (synchronous vs. asynchronous) was found. The asynchronous group showed clear mismatch effects in both vMMN and N2, while the synchronous group had such effect only...
Mental body representations retain homuncular shape distortions: Evidence from Weber’s illusion
Mental body representations underlying tactile perception do not accurately reflect the body’s true morphology. For example, perceived tactile distance is dependent on both the body part being touched and the stimulus orientation, a phenomenon called Weber’s illusion. These findings suggest the presence of size and shape distortions, respectively. However, whereas each morphological feature is typically measured in isolation, a com- plete morphological characterization requires the concurrent measurement of both size and shape. We did so in three experiments, manipulating both the stimulated body parts (hand; forearm) and stimulus orientation while requiring participants to make tactile dis- tance judgments. We found that the forearm was significantly more distorted than the hand lengthwise but not widthwise. Effects of stimulus orientation are thought to reflect receptive field anisotropies in primary somatosensory cortex. The results of the present study therefore suggest that mental body representations retain homuncular shape distortions that characterize early stages of somatosensory processing.
The Emotional Glue of the Senses: Affective Certainty and Congruency in the Rubber Hand Illusion
Our sense of body ownership relies on integrating different sensations according to their temporal and spatial congruency. Nevertheless, there is ongoing controversy about the role of affective congruency during multisensory integration, i.e. whether the stimuli to be perceived by the different sensory channels are congruent or incongruent in terms of their affective quality. In the present study, we applied a widely used multisensory integration paradigm, the Rubber Hand Illusion, to investigate the role of affective, top-down aspects of sensory congruency between visual and tactile modalities in the sense of body ownership. In Experiment 1 (N = 36), we touched participants with either soft or rough fabrics in their unseen hand, while they watched a rubber hand been touched synchronously with the same fabric or with a ‘hidden’ fabric of ‘uncertain roughness’. In Experiment 2 (N = 50), we used the same paradigm as in Experiment 1, but replaced the ‘uncertainty’ condition with an ‘in...
Seeing the body distorts tactile size perception
Cognition, 2013
Vision of the body modulates somatosensation, even when entirely non-informative about stimulation. For example, seeing the body increases tactile spatial acuity, but reduces acute pain. While previous results demonstrate that vision of the body modulates somatosensory sensitivity, it is unknown whether vision also affects metric properties of touch, and if so how. This study investigated how non-informative vision of the body modulates tactile size perception. We used the mirror box illusion to induce the illusion that participants were directly seeing their stimulated left hand, though they actually saw their reflected right hand. We manipulated whether participants: (a) had the illusion of directly seeing their stimulated left hand, (b) had the illusion of seeing a non-body object at the same location, or (c) looked directly at their non-stimulated right-hand. Participants made verbal estimates of the perceived distance between two tactile stimuli presented simultaneously to the dorsum of the left hand, either 20, 30, or 40mm apart. Vision of the body significantly reduced the perceived size of touch, compared to vision of the object or of the contralateral hand. In contrast, no apparent changes of perceived hand size were found. These results show that seeing the body distorts tactile size perception.