On identification dependence of (sense of own body) ownership

Why do we feel our body our own? How do we perceive our own body? What are the components of bodily self-perception and the sense of body ownership? What kind of relationship between the body and the sense of self? Questions like these might seem simple but still we do not have straight answers. On the contrary, these questions are still being discussed in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive sciences. Recently, the focus of philosophical and scientific interest a little bit shifted from the mind-body relationships to the real mechanisms underlying the experience of our corporeal self (Bermudez et al 1998; Gallagher 2005). This shift of interest is linked with recent discoveries in cognitive neuroscience, where body ownership has become an active topic. Several interesting experiments were conducted which can help us understand what how the sense of body ownership emerges. These experiments are an extension of the experiment with the rubber hand illusion (RHI), but in recent experiments researchers tried to cause an illusion of owning another body, not just the hand. In my paper I will briefly describe these experiments, then focus on a critique of the conclusions that researchers have made.

Eidos, 2022

There has been much discussion about the sense of ownership recently. It is a very controversial topic and even minimal consensus seems hard to achieve. In this paper we attempt to assess the prospects of achieving a better understanding of what is meant by ‘sense of body ownership’. In order to do so, we begin by addressing an objection on which the notion itself might depend, coming from the distinction between ‘inflationary’ and ‘deflationary’ accounts of the sense of body ownership. Once the path is clear, we will consider some influential ways of approaching the issue, which propose grounding the sense of ownership in the spatiality of bodily sensations, the affective dimension of bodily experience, and in its spatial dimension, among other things. We expect the results of our discussion will allow us to both identify the strongest candidates for an account of the sense of body ownership and to determine the challenges that must be met by competing explanations.

Neuropsychologia, 2010

2007

Abstract The recent distinction between sense of agency and sense of body-ownership has attracted considerable empirical and theoretical interest. The respective contributions of central motor signals and peripheral afferent signals to these two varieties of body experience remain unknown.

Scientific Reports, 2021

Body ownership concerns what it is like to feel a body part or a full body as mine, and has become a prominent area of study. We propose that there is a closely related type of bodily self-consciousness largely neglected by researchers—experiential ownership. It refers to the sense that I am the one who is having a conscious experience. Are body ownership and experiential ownership actually the same phenomenon or are they genuinely different? In our experiments, the participant watched a rubber hand or someone else’s body from the first-person perspective and was touched either synchronously or asynchronously. The main findings: (1) The sense of body ownership was hindered in the asynchronous conditions of both the body-part and the full-body experiments. However, a strong sense of experiential ownership was observed in those conditions. (2) We found the opposite when the participants’ responses were measured after tactile stimulations had ceased for 5 s. In the synchronous conditio...

2022

When I report that I feel my legs crossed, there are two occurrences of the first person. The first occurrence refers to the subject of the proprioceptive experience (I feel), and it reveals the subjectivity of the bodily sensation (what it is like for me to have my legs crossed). The second occurrence of the first person refers to the limbs that feel being crossed (my legs), and it reveals what has been called the sense of bodily ownership, for want of a better name (the awareness of the legs that are crossed as my own). Whereas it is the former occurrence of the first person that has attracted most attention from philosophers, especially in relation to the epistemic property of immunity to error through misidentification relative to the first person (Shoemaker, 1968), my focus will be on the latter occurrence, and in particular on its experiential dimension. In a nutshell, does it feel different when I am aware that my legs are my own and when I am not? Here I will argue that there is a phenomenology of bodily ownership, but that it should not be conceived in terms of a feeling of myness. After considering several reductionist attempts, I will defend what I call the Bodyguard hypothesis, which spells out the phenomenology of bodily ownership in affective terms.

2015

First and foremost, my thanks go out to my supervisor Felix Blankenburg, for giving me the freedom I wanted and the guidance I needed.

The moving Rubber Hand Illusion (mRHI) is a paradigm which investigates the sense of ownership (SoO) and the sense of agency (SoA) towards an artificial hand. This study aimed to highlight the role of the SoA on the development of the SoO according to the information provided by an actionrelated auditory cue. We expected that a reinforcement of the SoO illusion by the SoA could not occur if the sound of the action was removed. In order to assess the SoO and SoA, 25 participants performed the task in the the active congruent, passive congruent, and active incongruent conditions. Also, the onset time of the SoO in the congruent conditions was reported. The results confirmed our hypothesis, showing that agency did not play a pivotal role in promoting the onset of the ownership illusion if ecological auditory feedback was removed. Further research on the cross-modal assessment of individual bodily selfconsciousness is recommended.

Routledge eBooks, 2022

Depersonalization and the sense of bodily ownership (7680 including footnotes, excluding bibliography) Alexandre Billon Routledge Handbook of Bodily awareness, Alsmith A. and Longo M. (ed.) This is a pre peer-reviewed version, please quote the published version Depersonalization consists in a deep modification of the way things appear to a subject, leading him to feel estranged from his body, his actions, his thoughts, and his mind, and even from himself. Even though, when it was discovered at the end of the 19th century, this psychiatric condition was widely used to probe certain aspects of bodily awareness, and more specifically the sense of bodily ownership (SBO), it has been strangely neglected in contemporary debates. In this chapter, I argue that because of three specific features, depersonalization raises some important challenges for current theories of the SBO. The first feature-call it "generality"-is that depersonalization does not only affect the sense of bodily ownership but also, typically, the sense of ``mental ownership'' (SMO), the sense of agency or ``action ownership'' (SOA), and the subject's core sense of herself (CSS), that is, her awareness of herself as an I. The second feature is that except for the symptoms of depersonalization, depersonalized patients are hard to distinguish, psychologically, from normal subjects. This makes it hard to find psychological features that might explain their condition. The last feature, call it "fundamentality" is that the psychological features that do seem abnormal among depersonalized patients seem more likely to be explained by depersonalization than to explain it. These three features raise three challengesthe centrality challenge, the dissociation challenge, and the grounding challenge. Taken together, I will argue, these challenges suggest that the SBO depends on a form of phenomenal "mineness" that would mark my mental states as mine and that cannot be accounted for in sensorimotor, cognitive, or even affective terms. A phenomenal mineness that indeed seems to be psychologically primitive, and only accountable in neurophysiological terms.