Metacontrol and body ownership: divergent thinking increases the virtual hand illusion

Abstract

The virtual hand illusion (VHI) paradigm demonstrates that people tend to perceive agency and bodily ownership for a virtual hand that moves in synchrony with their own movements. Given that this kind of effect can be taken to reflect self-other integration (i.e., the integration of some external, novel event into the representation of oneself), and given that self-other integration has been previously shown to be affected by metacontrol states (biases of information processing towards persistence/selectivity or flexibility/integration), we tested whether the VHI varies in size depending on the metacontrol bias. Persistence and flexibility biases were induced by having participants carry out a convergent thinking (Remote Associates) task or divergent-thinking (Alternate Uses) task, respectively, while experiencing a virtual hand moving synchronously or asynchronously with their real hand. Synchrony-induced agency and ownership effects were more pronounced in the context of divergent thinking than in the context of convergent thinking, suggesting that a metacontrol bias towards flexibility promotes self-other integration.

Metacontrol and joint action: how shared goals transfer from one task to another?

“…Hommel and Wiers (2017) proposed that cognitive states related to persistence or flexibility directly affect action control (for an earlier account of cognitive control state theory see Goschke, 2003). According to Hommel (2015), differences in cognitive states can be characterized by more (or less) top-down influence of the current action goal leading to less (or more) self-other integration, and strong (or weak) mutual competition between alternative action representations (Ma & Hommel, 2018). Having a task goal related to persistence should therefore lead to less self-other integration, while shared task goals related to flexibility should lead to more self-other integration.…”

Representing Oneself and Others

“…Hence, both stimulus and action events are represented by codes of their perceptual features that are integrated into multimodal event files (Hommel, 2004). As pointed out elsewhere (Dolk et al, 2014; Hommel, Colzato & van den Wildenberg, 2009; Ma & Hommel, in press), the concept of an event file is perfectly suited to account for the representation of people, even though representations of human beings are likely to be more complex than representations of objects and also contain more abstract features (Greenwald et al, 2002). For instance, the feature of fatherhood is likely to be grounded in sensorimotor experiences with other adults caring about and playing with a particular infant, driving a particular adolescent to school, hosting the grown-up adolescent on important holidays, and living with someone else doing the same (cf.…”

Cognitive load dissociates explicit and implicit measures of body ownership and agency

“…While some authors have considered the possibility of a pure bottom-up account, which might rely on correlations between body-generated sensory feedback provided by the available sensory modalities (e.g., Botvinick & Cohen, 1998), others have claimed the existence of stable internal body representations that guide the perception of ownership in a top-down fashion (Tsakiris, 2017). Still others have considered the possibility that the perception of ownership might emerge from multiple sources, which might include both bottom-up and top-down contributions (Apps & Tsakiris, 2014;Ma & Hommel, 2020, 2015bSynofzik et al, 2008aSynofzik et al, , 2008b. Multiple-source accounts open the possibility that measures differ with respect to the nature of the underlying informational sources, so that some measures may rely more on top-down or on bottom-up information than others, which may explain the different sensitivities to experimental manipulations and the low correlations between measures.…”