TY  - JOUR
A1  - Pfister, Robert
A1  - Klaffehn, Annika L.
A1  - Kalckert, Andreas
A1  - Kunde, Winfried
A1  - Dignath, David
T1  - How to lose a hand: Sensory updating drives disembodiment
JF  - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
N2  - Body representations are readily expanded based on sensorimotor experience. A dynamic view of body representations, however, holds that these representations cannot only be expanded but that they can also be narrowed down by disembodying elements of the body representation that are no longer warranted. Here we induced illusory ownership in terms of a moving rubber hand illusion and studied the maintenance of this illusion across different conditions. We observed ownership experience to decrease gradually unless participants continued to receive confirmatory multisensory input. Moreover, a single instance of multisensory mismatch – a hammer striking the rubber hand but not the real hand – triggered substantial and immediate disembodiment. Together, these findings support and extend previous theoretical efforts to model body representations through basic mechanisms of multisensory integration. They further support an updating model suggesting that embodied entities fade from the body representation if they are not refreshed continuously.
KW  - body representation
KW  - embodiment
KW  - disembodiment
KW  - moving rubber-hand illusion
Y1  - 2021
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-235195
SN  - 1069-9384
VL  - 28
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Eck, Julia
A1  - Dignath, David
A1  - Kalckert, Andreas
A1  - Pfister, Roland
T1  - Instant disembodiment of virtual body parts
JF  - Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics
N2  - Evidence from multisensory body illusions suggests that body representations may be malleable, for instance, by embodying external objects. However, adjusting body representations to current task demands also implies that external objects become disembodied from the body representation if they are no longer required. In the current web-based study, we induced the embodiment of a two-dimensional (2D) virtual hand that could be controlled by active movements of a computer mouse or on a touchpad. Following initial embodiment, we probed for disembodiment by comparing two conditions: Participants either continued moving the virtual hand or they stopped moving and kept the hand still. Based on theoretical accounts that conceptualize body representations as a set of multisensory bindings, we expected gradual disembodiment of the virtual hand if the body representations are no longer updated through correlated visuomotor signals. In contrast to our prediction, the virtual hand was instantly disembodied as soon as participants stopped moving it. This result was replicated in two follow-up experiments. The observed instantaneous disembodiment might suggest that humans are sensitive to the rapid changes that characterize action and body in virtual environments, and hence adjust corresponding body representations particularly swiftly.
KW  - body representation
KW  - embodiment
KW  - disembodiment
KW  - moving rubber hand illusion
KW  - virtual hand illusion
Y1  - 2022
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-324844
VL  - 84
IS  - 8
ER  -