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 in N2. The results indicate that
after the elicitation of RHI bottom-up integration could be retrieved at the
early stage of sensory processing before top-down processing, providing
evidence for the priority of the bottom-up processes after the generation of
RHI and revealing the mechanism of how the body-ownership is unconsciously
distorted in the brain.
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