Weakening the subjective sensation of own hand ownership does not interfere with rapid finger movements

Abstract

When we perform a movement we generally have a clear distinction between which parts of the world constitute our body and which parts do not. However, how the sense of ownership over our body supports movement is not yet fully understood. We aimed to see whether a sense of ownership over the hand supports the performance of rapid hand movements. In three experiments (n=48, n=30, n=24), we presented participants with congruent and incongruent visuotactile and visuoproprioceptive information regarding their own hand. In keeping with previous experiments, multisensory disintegration resulted in a reduction in the subjective sensation of ownership over the hand, as reflected in questionnaire responses. Following sensory stimulation, participants were required to rapidly abduct their index finger whilst the movement was tracked. We examined the hypothesis that, should a sense of ownership over the limb be necessary for generating rapid movements with that limb, reaction time would increase when hand ownership was reduced, whilst the acceleration and velocity of the movement would decrease. We observed that reductions in own hand ownership did not interfere with rapid index finger abduction, suggesting that the motor system may not be reliant on a subjective sense of ownership over the body in order to generate movement.

Perception of Our Own Body Influences Self-Concept and Self-Incoherence Impairs Episodic Memory

“…Two additional observations deserve brief discussion. First, visuotactile asynchrony in the asyncS condition reduced ownership of one's own actual body, which extends previous work that found such effects only for a single limb ( Gentile et al., 2013 ; Kannape et al., 2019 ; Reader and Ehrsson, 2019 ) or when viewing oneself from a distance ( Ehrsson, 2007 ; Guterstam et al., 2015b ; Guterstam and Ehrsson, 2012 ). This result provides further support for multisensory models of full-body ownership ( Ehrsson, 2020 , 2012 ; Kilteni et al., 2015 ) by generalizing the temporal congruence principle—previously established in studies using mannequins ( Petkova and Ehrsson, 2008 ), computer-simulated avatars ( Slater et al., 2009 ), and unknown others ( Preston and Ehrsson, 2014 ; Tacikowski et al., 2020 )—to the case of one's real body viewed from a natural first-person perspective.…”

Impact of visuomotor feedback on the embodiment of virtual hands detached from the body

“…However, in Experiment 1 we observed the opposite pattern in unaware participants, with increased motor performance when the sense of ownership was stronger due to the embodiment of connected realistic hands. Interestingly, in a recent study, Reader and Ehrsson 58 showed that a decrease in own hand ownership does not necessarily impact motor planning and behaviors. Therefore, it is possible that the feeling of body ownership and its relationship with the motor system are further influenced by additional top-down factors such as body self-consciousness (i.e., noticing differences in the body representation) or even by different affordances related to the visual appearances of an artificial body (e.g., having a long arm might make it seem more flexible or having a disconnected hand might result in it being more difficult to localize in space).…”