Rubber hand illusion (RHI)

Botvinick & Cohen (1998). The classic manipulation of the experience-of-body-ownership: synchronous stroking of a fake hand (with the real hand hidden) makes the fake hand feel like one’s own. It is the empirical anchor for Seth’s predictive account of the bodily self.

Why it matters in Seth (2013)

• Predictive-coding reframing: multisensory conflict is resolved by minimizing self-related precision-weighted prediction error, updating amodal self-priors to include the fake hand. Mere expectation of correlated input suffices (Ferri et al. 2013) — correlation isn’t necessary, prediction is.
• Interoceptive RHI (Suzuki et al. 2013): augmented-reality virtual hand flashing synchronously with the heartbeat enhances ownership (questionnaire + proprioceptive drift). Extended to the full-body illusion with cardio-visual synchrony (Aspell et al. 2013).
• Individual differences: lower interoceptive-sensitivity → greater RHI susceptibility (Tsakiris et al. 2011).
• Autonomic accompaniments: RHI induction lowers real-hand temperature, raises histamine reactivity, and threat to the rubber hand evokes skin-conductance responses — read via active-inference as descending self-predictions tuning autonomic reflexes.

What the paradigm is an instance of

Worth stating explicitly since the Quigley et al. (2021) ingest. The RHI is the wiki’s canonical case of multisensory-integration in its traditional (exteroceptive × exteroceptive) sense — vision and touch — and the cardio-visual variants are the wiki’s oldest case of the widened sense, interoceptive × exteroceptive. Quigley et al. use the pair to make the point that integration crosses the boundary, and read the Tsakiris et al. (2011) individual-difference result as a precision competition between the two kinds of evidence (see experience-of-body-ownership). Tsakiris himself wrote that section; he now has a page — manos-tsakiris.

The lesion version of the paradigm, unrun

Jones, Ward & Critchley (2010) note that the RHI activates right posterior insula in healthy participants (Tsakiris et al. 2007) — the same region whose focal damage produces somatoparaphrenia, the pathological disowning of a limb (anosognosia). They propose the obvious follow-up: run the RHI on patients with posterior-insula lesions against other lesion groups, expecting them to be resistant.

Worth flagging because the wiki’s own material predicts the opposite. On the precision-competition reading of Tsakiris et al. (2011) — see experience-of-body-ownership — weaker interoceptive representations mean a self-model more dominated by exteroceptive input, so lesioning interoceptive cortex should raise susceptibility. Two opposite predictions, one cheap study, sixteen years and counting.

Measurement caveat

Proprioceptive drift and subjective ownership ratings can dissociate (Rohde et al. 2011), so the two RHI readouts should not be treated as interchangeable indices of a single “ownership” quantity.