The Old Rubber Hand Trick: Where is the Self Located?

Perceiving touch and your self outside of your body

When you feel you are being touched, usually someone or something is physically touching you and you perceive that your "self" is located in the same place as your body. In new research published in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE, neuroscientists at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, investigated the relationship between bodily self-consciousness and the way touch stimuli are spatially represented in humans. They found that sensations of touch can be felt and mislocalised towards where a "virtual" body is seen. These findings will provide new avenues for the animation of virtual worlds and machines.

In their previous research, Professor Olaf Blanke's lab at the EPFL found that the consciousness of one's own body (the sense of self-identification and self-location) can be altered in healthy people under certain experimental conditions, yielding similar sensations to those felt in out-of-body experiences. In this new study, Aspell and colleagues in Blanke's lab used a crossmodal congruency task to determine whether there is a change in touch perception during this illusion.

A number of earlier studies showed that if a rubber hand is positioned such that it extends from a person's arm while her actual hand is hidden from view, and both her real hand and the rubber hand are stroked at the same time, she seems to feel the touch in the location where she sees the rubber hand being touched. This effect and the experienced 'ownership' of the rubber hand is the "rubber hand illusion."

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