Sense of Ownership, Self-location, and Gaze Responses in Virtual Rubber Hand Illusion

Abstract

It is known that the illusion of body ownership, like as the rubber hand illusion, affects the proprioceptive sense of body position. In the present study, we investigated whether eye movements and pupil responses to the location where the sense of body ownership was induced were also affected. We presented a virtual left hand on a head mounted display and stroked both the virtual hand and the real left hand with a brush, while a light suddenly appeared on the virtual left hand or empty right space randomly. The participants were asked to move the eyes on the light. We found that the illusory ownership of the virtual hand occurred with proprioceptive self-location drift by the synchronous stroking, but the saccade eye movements and pupil sizes were not affected by the illusory body ownership, suggesting that the gaze responses may be independent from the self-body representation.