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Effects of Symmetry and Apparent Distance in a Parasagittal-Mirror Variant of the Rubber Hand Illusion Paradigm.

ABSTRACT: When I see my face in a mirror, its apparent position (behind the glass) is not one that my own face could be in. I accept the face I see as my own because I have an implicit understanding of how mirrors work. The situation is different if I look at the reflection of my right hand in a parasagittal mirror (parallel to body midline) when my left hand is hidden behind the mirror. It is as if I were looking through a window at my own left hand. The experience of body ownership has been investigated using rubber hand illusion (RHI) paradigms, and several studies have demonstrated ownership of a rubber hand viewed in a frontal mirror. Our "proof of concept" study was the first to combine use of a parasagittal mirror and synchronous stroking of both a prosthetic hand (viewed in the mirror) and the participant's hand, with a manipulation of distance between the hands. The strength of the RHI elicited by our parasagittal-mirror paradigm depended not on physical distance between the hands (30, 45, or 60 cm) but on apparent distance between the prosthetic hand (viewed in the mirror) and the participant's hand. This apparent distance was reduced to zero when the prosthetic hand and participant's hand were arranged symmetrically (e.g., 30 cm in front of and behind the mirror). Thus, the parasagittal-mirror paradigm may provide a distinctive way to assess whether competition for ownership depends on spatial separation between the prosthetic hand and the participant's hand.

SUBMITTER: de Silva J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8481812 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Some recent papers by P. Lush and colleagues have argued that the rubber hand illusion (RHI), where participants can feel a rubber hand as their own under appropriate multisensory stimulation, may be caused mainly by hypnotic suggestibility and expectations (demand characteristics). These papers rely primarily on a study with 353 participants who took part in a RHI experiment carried out in a classical way with brush stroking. Participants experienced a synchronous condition where the rubber hand was seen to be touched in synchrony with touch felt on their corresponding hidden real hand, or the touches were applied asynchronously as a control. Each participant had a related measure of their hypnotisability on a scale known as the Sussex-Waterloo Scale of Hypnotisability (SWASH). The authors found a correlation between the questionnaire ratings of the RHI in the synchronous condition and the SWASH score. From this, they concluded that the RHI is largely driven by suggestibility and further proposed that suggestibility and expectations may even entirely explain the RHI. Here we examine their claims in a series of extensive new analyses of their data. We find that at every level of SWASH, the synchronous stimulation results in greater levels of the illusion than the asynchronous condition; moreover, proprioceptive drift is greater in the synchronous case at every level of SWASH. Thus, while the level of hypnotisability does modestly influence the subjective reports (higher SWASH is associated with somewhat higher illusion ratings), the major difference between the synchronous and asynchronous stimulation is always present. Furthermore, by including in the model the participants' expectancy ratings of how strongly they initially believed they would experience the RHI in the two conditions, we show that expectations had a very small effect on the illusion ratings; model comparisons further demonstrate that the multisensory condition is two-to-three-times as dominant as the other factors, with hypnotisability contributing modestly and expectations negligibly. Thus, although the results indicate that trait suggestibility may modulate the RHI, presumably through intersubject variations in top-down factors, the findings also suggest that the primary explanation for the RHI is as a multisensory bodily illusion.

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Effects of Symmetry and Apparent Distance in a Parasagittal-Mirror Variant of the Rubber Hand Illusion Paradigm.

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