Neural correlates of the rubber hand illusion in amputees: A report of two cases

Laura Schmalzl · Andreas Kalckert · Christina Ragnö · H. Henrik Ehrsson

53 citations0/0 files storedNeurocase

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Multisensory perception and integration Virtual Reality Applications and Impacts Tactile and Sensory Interactions

Abstract

One of the current challenges in the field of advanced prosthetics is the development of artificial limbs that provide the user with detailed sensory feedback. Sensory feedback from our limbs is not only important for proprioceptive awareness and motor control, but also essential for providing us with a feeling of ownership or simply put, the sensation that our limbs actually belong to ourselves. The strong link between sensory feedback and ownership has been repeatedly demonstrated with the so-called rubber hand illusion (RHI), during which individuals are induced with the illusory sensation that an artificial hand is their own. In healthy participants, this occurs via integration of visual and tactile signals, which is primarily supported by multisensory regions in premotor and intraparietal cortices. Here, we describe a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study with two upper limb amputees, showing for the first time that the same brain regions underlie ownership sensations of an artificial hand in this population. Albeit preliminary, these findings are interesting from both a theoretical as well as a clinical point of view. From a theoretical perspective, they imply that even years after the amputation, a few seconds of synchronous visuotactile stimulation are sufficient to activate hand-centered multisensory integration mechanisms. From a clinical perspective, they show that a very basic sensation of touch from an artificial hand can be obtained by simple but precisely targeted stimulation of the stump, and suggest that a similar mechanism implemented in prosthetic hands would greatly facilitate ownership sensations and in turn, acceptance of the prosthesis.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 53 citations exist upstream.

References

2005Touching a Rubber Hand: Feeling of Body Ownership Is Associated with Activity in Multisensory Brain Areas 1996Coding of peripersonal space in inferior premotor cortex (area F4)2000Visual Capture of Touch: Out-of-the-Body Experiences With Rubber Gloves 2005Reference frames for representing visual and tactile locations in parietal cortex 2006Spatial limits on referred touch to an alien limb may reflect boundaries of visuo-tactile peripersonal space surrounding the hand 2012The new handbook of multisensory processes 2012The Concept of Body Ownership and Its Relation to Multisensory Integration 2011From Part- to Whole-Body Ownership in the Multisensory Brain

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.