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Focused Review ARTICLE

Inducing illusory ownership of a virtual body

Mel Slater1,2,3*, Daniel Perez-Marcos4, H. Henrik Ehrsson5 and Maria V. Sanchez-Vives1,4
1
Institució Catalana Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain
2
Facultat de Psicologia, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
3
Department of Computer Science, University College London, London, UK
4
Institut d’Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer, Barcelona, Spain
5
Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden
We discuss three experiments that investigate how virtual limbs and bodies can come to feel like real limbs and bodies. The first experiment shows that an illusion of ownership of a virtual arm appearing to project out of a person's shoulder can be produced by tactile stimulation on a person's hidden real hand and synchronous stimulation on the seen virtual hand. The second shows that the illusion can be produced by synchronous movement of the person's hidden real hand and a virtual hand. The third shows that a weaker form of the illusion can be produced when a brain–computer interface is employed to move the virtual hand by means of motor imagery without any tactile stimulation. We discuss related studies that indicate that the ownership illusion may be generated for an entire body. This has important implications for the scientific understanding of body ownership and several practical applications.
Keywords:
rubber hand illusion, body ownership, virtual reality, presence
Citation:
Slater M, Pérez Marcos D, Ehrsson H and Sanchez-Vives MV (2009). Inducing illusory ownership of a virtual body.Front. Neurosci. 3,2:214- 220. doi: 10.3389/neuro.01.029.2009
Received:
03 May 2009;
 Paper pending published:
28 June 2009;
Accepted:
14 July 2009;
 Published online:
15 September 2009.

Edited by:

Maurizio Corbetta, Washington University, USA

Reviewed by:

Olaf Blanke, University of Geneva, Switzerland; Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
Maurizio Corbetta, Washington University, USA
Copyright:
© 2009 Slater, Perez-Marcos, Ehrsson and Sanchez-Vives. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.
*Correspondence:
Mel Slater, EVENT Lab Universitat de Barcelona Facultat de Psicologia, Departament de Personalitat, Avaluació i Tractaments Psicològics, Campus de Mundet - Edifici Teatre, Passeig de la Vall dquotidnHebron 171, 08035 Barcelona Spain. e-mail: melslater@ub.edu

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