%0 Journal Article
%@ 0962-8452
%A Cataldo, Antonio
%A Crivelli, Damiano
%A Bottini, Gabriella
%A Gomi, Hiroaki
%A Haggard, Patrick
%D 2024
%F discovery:10186158
%J Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
%K bodily self-awareness, body ownership, rubber hand illusion, self-touch, voluntary action, Humans, Touch, Illusions, Visual Perception, Touch Perception, Hand, Proprioception, Body Image
%N 2015
%T Active self-touch restores bodily proprioceptive spatial awareness following disruption by 'rubber hand illusion'
%U https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10186158/
%V 291
%X Bodily self-awareness relies on a constant integration of visual, tactile, proprioceptive, and motor signals. In the 'rubber hand illusion' (RHI), conflicting visuo-tactile stimuli lead to changes in self-awareness. It remains unclear whether other, somatic signals could compensate for the alterations in self-awareness caused by visual information about the body. Here, we used the RHI in combination with robot-mediated self-touch to systematically investigate the role of tactile, proprioceptive and motor signals in maintaining and restoring bodily self-awareness. Participants moved the handle of a leader robot with their right hand and simultaneously received corresponding tactile feedback on their left hand from a follower robot. This self-touch stimulation was performed either before or after the induction of a classical RHI. Across three experiments, active self-touch delivered after-but not before-the RHI, significantly reduced the proprioceptive drift caused by RHI, supporting a restorative role of active self-touch on bodily self-awareness. The effect was not present during involuntary self-touch. Unimodal control conditions confirmed that both tactile and motor components of self-touch were necessary to restore bodily self-awareness. We hypothesize that active self-touch transiently boosts the precision of proprioceptive representation of the touched body part, thus counteracting the visual capture effects that underlie the RHI.
%Z © 2024 The Authors.    Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.