Uncertainty-based inference of a common cause for body ownership
- Karolinska Institutet, Sweden
- New York University, United States
Abstract
Many studies have investigated the contributions of vision, touch, and proprioception to body ownership, i.e., the multisensory perception of limbs and body parts as our own. However, the computational processes and principles that determine subjectively experienced body ownership remain unclear. To address this issue, we developed a detection-like psychophysics task based on the classic rubber hand illusion paradigm where participants were asked to report whether the rubber hand felt like their own (the illusion) or not. We manipulated the asynchrony of visual and tactile stimuli delivered to the rubber hand and the hidden real hand under different levels of visual noise. We found that (1) the probability of the emergence of the rubber hand illusion increased with visual noise and was well predicted by a causal inference model involving the observer computing the probability of the visual and tactile signals coming from a common source; (2) the causal inference model outperformed a non-Bayesian model involving the observer not taking into account sensory uncertainty; (3) by comparing body ownership and visuotactile synchrony detection, we found that the prior probability of inferring a common cause for the two types of multisensory percept was correlated but greater for ownership, which suggests that individual differences in rubber hand illusion can be explained at the computational level as differences in how priors are used in the multisensory integration process. These results imply that the same statistical principles determine the perception of the bodily self and the external world.
Data availability
Figure 3 - Source Data 1, Figure 4- Source Data 1, and Figure 5 -Source Data1 contain the numerical data used to generate the figures and their supplements.; These Source Data files have also been made available: https://osf.io/zu2h6/
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
European Research Council (787386)
- H Henrik Ehrsson
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: All volunteers provided written informed consent prior to their participation. All experiments were approved by the Swedish Ethics Review Authority (Ethics number 2018/471-31/2).
Copyright
© 2022, Chancel et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Uncertainty-based inference of a common cause for body ownership
eLife 11:e77221.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.77221
Further reading
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When navigating environments with changing rules, human brain circuits flexibly adapt how and where we retain information to help us achieve our immediate goals.
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