The body-ownership is unconsciously distorted in the brain: An event-related potential study of rubber hand illusion
Lu Aitao,
Wang Xuebin,
Hong Xiuxiu,
Song Tianhua,
Zhang Meifang,
Huang Xin
Affiliations
Lu Aitao
Key Laboratory of Brain, Cognition and Education Sciences, Ministry of Education, China + School of Psychology, Center for Studies of Psychological Application, China + Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, South China Normal University, China
Wang Xuebin
Key Laboratory of Brain, Cognition and Education Sciences, Ministry of Education, China + School of Psychology, Center for Studies of Psychological Application, China + Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, South China Normal University, China
Hong Xiuxiu
Center for faculty development and educational assessment, Shantou University, China
Song Tianhua
Key Laboratory of Brain, Cognition and Education Sciences, Ministry of Education, China + School of Psychology, Center for Studies of Psychological Application, China + Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, South China Normal University, China
Zhang Meifang
Key Laboratory of Brain, Cognition and Education Sciences, Ministry of Education, China + School of Psychology, Center for Studies of Psychological Application, China + Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, South China Normal University, China
Huang Xin
Key Laboratory of Brain, Cognition and Education Sciences, Ministry of Education, China + School of Psychology, Center for Studies of Psychological Application, China + Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, South China Normal University, China
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.
