Experience of body ownership (EBO)

A central plank of embodied-selfhood and a key testbed for interoceptive-inference in Seth (2013). EBO is probed with the rubber-hand-illusion and full-body illusions, and Seth argues it is shaped by predictive multisensory integration of precision-weighted interoceptive and exteroceptive signals.

Predictive-coding account

Classical multisensory-integration accounts explain the RHI via visual capture and statistical correlations across vision/touch/proprioception. Seth recasts this in predictive-coding terms: minimizing self-related precision-weighted prediction error updates high-level (amodal) self-priors to incorporate the fake hand. Consistent with this, mere expectation of correlated input can induce the RHI (Ferri et al. 2013).

Interoceptive contribution — the novel evidence

• Suzuki et al. (2013): an augmented-reality virtual hand flashing in time with the heartbeat (cardio-visual synchrony) enhances ownership, measured by questionnaire and proprioceptive drift.
• Aspell et al. (2013): cardio-visual synchrony applied to a full virtual body increases identification with it.
• Tsakiris et al. (2011): lower interoceptive-sensitivity predicts greater RHI susceptibility — read as lower precision-weighting of interoceptive prediction errors.
• Autonomic accompaniments (temperature drop, histamine reactivity, skin-conductance to rubber-hand threat) fit descending self-related predictions tuning autonomic reflexes via active-inference.

Together these show statistical correlations between interoceptive and exteroceptive channels can update self-models, extending multisensory prediction-error minimization inward.

The competition reading, and its price (Quigley et al. 2021)

Quigley et al. (2021) — Tsakiris’s own section, so this is the author of the 2011 result glossing it — states the Tsakiris et al. (2011) finding as a competition rather than a correlation: participants with lower interoceptive awareness showed stronger alteration of body ownership, suggesting that “in the absence of accurate interoceptive representations, one’s model of self is dominated by exteroceptive input.”

The mechanism offered is relative precision: individuals differ in interoceptive accuracy and awareness partly because of “the relative precision of incoming interoceptive versus exteroceptive signals used to compute the relative probabilities that a given sensory signal is related to one’s own body” (Ainley et al. 2016, “bodily precision”). See predictive-coding, interoceptive-sensitivity, multisensory-integration.

Two things this sharpens on this page:

• The RHI is not “vision overriding proprioception with interoception as a modifier.” It is one integration in which interoceptive and exteroceptive evidence are weighted against each other, and the illusion is what a low interoceptive weight looks like from the inside.
• It gives is-more-interoceptive-awareness-better one of its cleaner cases in the favourable direction: here, more interoceptive precision means a self-model less capturable by external input. Whether that is a good thing is not obvious — a self-model that cannot be updated by the world has its own failure mode — and no wiki source addresses that.

A caution the page should carry: Quigley et al. add nothing empirical, and the additional citations they marshal (Schauder et al. 2015 on autism, Tajadura-Jiménez & Tsakiris 2014 on self-other boundaries, Ainley & Tsakiris 2013 on self-objectification) are largely from the same laboratory as the original result.

When it fails clinically, and the experiment that would test this page

Everything above is body ownership manipulated in healthy people. Jones, Ward & Critchley (2010) add what it looks like when it breaks: somatoparaphrenia, in which a patient disowns her own limb and experiences it as a foreign body — produced, in Cereda et al.’s (2002) case 4, by a focal right posterior insular lesion. See anosognosia for the wider family (denial of paralysis, denial of lost sensation).

The anatomy converges with the healthy paradigm: right posterior insula activates during the rubber-hand-illusion (Tsakiris et al. 2007), and during PET when observed movement matches executed movement, with activity falling as the sense of controlling the movement is reduced (Farrer et al. 2003). So the same region participates in the illusion and, when destroyed, produces the pathology.

The experiment nobody has run, proposed by Jones et al.: test patients with posterior-insula lesions on the RHI against other lesion groups. They expect resistance to the illusion. The precision-competition account this page holds from Tsakiris predicts the opposite — lower interoceptive precision means a self-model more easily captured by exteroceptive input, so removing interoceptive cortex should make patients more susceptible. Two clean, opposite predictions from the two literatures this page draws on, and the study is cheap. Recorded as the most tractable open item here.

As a model for insight (Farb et al. 2015)

Farb et al. (2015) read the RHI as a concrete illustration of prioritizing priors (visual interpretation) over prediction errors (afferent interoceptive/proprioceptive signals from the real hand) — the same active/perceptual-inference tension they apply to contemplative practice. They suggest perceptual-inference (weighting sensory PEs over priors) could, in principle, similarly reduce false inferences about the relationship between one’s body and the world, extending the RHI’s relevance beyond body ownership per se toward a general model of interoceptive insight.