Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 19, 2026

Creating Virtual-hand and Virtual-face Illusions to Investigate Self-representation
Published on: March 1, 2017
The rubber hand illusion revisited: visuotactile integration and self-attribution
Manos Tsakiris1, Patrick Haggard
1Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Department of Psychology, University College London, London, United Kingdom. e.tsakiris@ucl.ac.uk
Abstract:
Watching a rubber hand being stroked, while one's own unseen hand is synchronously stroked, may cause the rubber hand to be attributed to one's own body, to "feel like it's my hand." A behavioral measure of the rubber hand illusion (RHI) is a drift of the perceived position of one's own hand toward the rubber hand. The authors investigated (a) the influence of general body scheme representations on the RHI in Experiments 1 and 2 and (b) the necessary conditions of visuotactile stimulation underlying the RHI in Experiments 3 and 4. Overall, the results suggest that at the level of the process underlying the build up of the RHI, bottom-up processes of visuotactile correlation drive the illusion as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition. Conversely, at the level of the phenomenological content, the illusion is modulated by top-down influences originating from the representation of one's own body.
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