Cues of control modulate the ascription of object ownership

2017

6 Abstract Knowing whether an object is owned and by 7 whom is essential to avoid costly conflicts. We hypothesize 8 that everyday interactions around objects are influenced by 9 a minimal sense of object ownership grounded on respect 10 of possession. In particular, we hypothesize that tracking 11 object ownership can be influenced by any cue that predicts 12 the establishment of individual physical control over 13 objects. To test this hypothesis we used an indirect method 14 to determine whether visual cues of physical control like 15 spatial proximity to an object, temporal priority in seeing 16 it, and touching it influence this minimal sense of object 17 ownership. In Experiment 1 participants were shown a 18 neutral object located on a table, in the reaching space of 19 one of two characters. In Experiment 2 one character found 20 the object first; then another character appeared and saw 21 the object. In Experiments 3 and 4, spatial proximity, 22 temporal priority, and touch...

Experimental Brain Research, 2014

3 demonstrated that merely choosing to use a mug was not sufficient to elicit rightward drift or acceleration effects. We suggest that these findings reflect separate and distinct mechanisms associated with socially related visuomotor processing.

Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2013

Previous research has shown that individuals value objects more highly if they own them, a finding commonly known as the endowment effect. In fact, simply touching an object can create a perception of ownership that produces the endowment effect. In this paper, we extend this line of research in several ways. First, we show that haptic imagery, or imagining touching an object, can have the same effect on perceived ownership as physical touch. We then demonstrate that haptic imagery can lead to perceptions of physical control, which in turn increase feelings of ownership. Moreover, the more vivid the haptic imagery, the greater the perception of control and the feeling of ownership. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2011

■ Previous research has demonstrated that higher-order cognitive processes associated with the allocation of selective attention are engaged when highly familiar self-relevant items are encountered, such as oneʼs name, face, personal possessions and the like. The goal of our study was to determine whether these effects on attentional processing are triggered on-line at the moment self-relevance is established. In a pair of experiments, we recorded ERPs as participants viewed common objects (e.g., apple, socks, and ketchup) in the context of an "ownership" paradigm, where the presentation of each object was followed by a cue indicating whether the object nominally belonged either to the participant (a "self " cue) or the experimenter (an "other" cue). In Experiment 1, we found that "self " ownership cues were associated with increased attentional processing, as measured via the P300 component. In Experiment 2, we replicated this effect while demonstrating that at a visualperceptual level, spatial attention became more narrowly focused on objects owned by self, as measured via the lateral occipital P1 ERP component. Taken together, our findings indicate that self-relevant attention effects are triggered by the act of taking ownership of objects associated with both perceptual and postperceptual processing in cortex. ■

eLife, 2017

The sense of ownership of one’s body is important for survival, e.g., in defending the body against a threat. However, in addition to affecting behavior, it also affects perception of the world. In the case of visuospatial perception, it has been shown that the sense of ownership causes external space to be perceptually scaled according to the size of the body. Here, we investigated the effect of ownership on another fundamental aspect of visual perception: visual awareness. In two binocular rivalry experiments, we manipulated the sense of ownership of a stranger’s hand through visuotactile stimulation while that hand was one of the rival stimuli. The results show that ownership, but not mere visuotactile stimulation, increases the dominance of the hand percept. This effect is due to a combination of longer perceptual dominance durations and shorter suppression durations. Together, these results suggest that the sense of body ownership promotes visual awareness.

Journal of Consumer Research, 2009

Prior research has assumed that touch has a persuasive effect only if it provides attribute or structural information about a product. Under this view, the role of touch as a persuasive tool is limited. The main purpose of this research is to investigate the persuasive influence of touch as an affective tool in the absence of useful product-related information. The authors find that for people who are motivated to touch because it is fun or interesting, a communication that incorporates touch leads to increased affective response and increased persuasion, particularly when the touch provides neutral or positive sensory feedback. People who are not motivated to touch for fun will also be persuaded by a communication that incorporates touch when they are able to make sense of how the touch is related to the message. The authors explore the effectiveness of different types of touch in generating an affective response, and they replicate the effects on attitudes and behavior in a real-world setting. This research suggests that the marketing implications of touch are more substantial than previously believed. The

Psychology & Marketing, 1999

The mere ownership effect (Beggan, 1992) is defined as the tendency of an owner to evaluate an object more favorably than a nonowner. The present research extends this idea to how people evaluate their property in comparison to others' property. The general hypothesis was that people would display an interpersonally based mere ownership effect and evaluate their possessions more favorably than others' possessions. Study 1 provided an initial confirmation of this hypothesis by showing that people associated more good traits with their possessions than the possessions of others. Studies 2, 3, and 5 ruled out alternative explanations for the ownership effects. Study 4 found that the attributes owners used to describe a possession were more positive than the attributes used by nonowners. Implications of the results for marketing and marketing research are considered.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2013

The rubber hand illusion refers to the observation that participants perceive "body ownership" for a rubber hand if it moves, or is stroked in synchrony with the participant's real (covered) hand. Research indicates that events targeting artificial body parts can trigger affective responses (affective resonance) only with perceived body ownership, while neuroscientific findings suggest affective resonance irrespective of ownership (e.g., when observing other individuals under threat). We hypothesized that this may depend on the severity of the event. We first replicated previous findings that the rubber hand illusion can be extended to virtual hands-the virtual-hand illusion. We then tested whether hand ownership and affective resonance (assessed by galvanic skin conductance) are modulated by the experience of an event that either "impacted" (a ball hitting the hand) or "threatened" (a knife cutting the hand) the virtual hand. Ownership was stronger if the virtual hand moved synchronously with the participant's own hand, but this effect was independent from whether the hand was impacted or threatened. Affective resonance was mediated by ownership however: In the face of mere impact, participants showed more resonance in the synchronous condition (i.e., with perceived ownership) than in the asynchronous condition. In the face of threat, in turn, affective resonance was independent of synchronicity-participants were emotionally involved even if a threat was targeting a hand that they did not perceive as their own. Our findings suggest that perceived body ownership and affective responses to body-related impact or threat can be dissociated and are thus unlikely to represent the same underlying process. We argue that affective reactions to impact are produced in a top-down fashion if the impacted effector is assumed to be part of one's own body, whereas threatening events trigger affective responses more directly in a bottom-up fashion-irrespective of body ownership. The virtual-hand illusion: effects of impact and threat on perceived ownership and affective resonance. Front. Psychol. 4:604.

I introduce and defend the notion of a cognitive account of the sense of ownership. A cognitive account of the sense of ownership holds that one experiences something as one's own only if one thinks of something as one's own. By contrast, a phenomenal account of the sense of ownership holds that one can experience something as one's own without thinking about anything as one's own. I argue that we have no reason to favour phenomenal accounts over cognitive accounts, that cognitive accounts are plausible given that much of our mental activity has unnoticed effects on our mental life, and that certain illusory experiences of body ownership sometimes described as thought-independent may be best explained as imaginative perceptual experiences.

Experimental Brain Research, 2020

We investigated whether embodied ownership is evident in early childhood. To do so, we gifted a drinking bottle to children (aged 24 to 48 months) to use for two weeks. They returned to perform reach-grasp-lift-replace actions with their own or the experimenter's bottle while we recorded their movements using motion capture. There were differences in motor interactions with self-vs experimenter-owned bottles, such that children positioned self-owned bottles significantly closer to themselves compared with the experimenter's bottle. Age did not modulate the positioning of the self-owned bottle relative to the experimenter-owned bottle. In contrast, the pattern was not evident in children who selected one of the two bottles to keep only after the task was completed, and thus did not 'own' it during the task (experiment 2). These results extend similar findings in adults, confirming the importance of ownership in determining self-other differences and provide novel evidence that object ownership influences sensorimotor processes from as early as two years of age. Property is significant in most societies: who has access to it-or not-is the basis of formal and informal rules and regulations. Moreover, self-owned items are judged more positively and are attributed a higher value compared with other-owned items (Beggan, 1992; Kahneman & Tversky 1984; Kahneman, Knetsch & Thaler, 1991) and become part of the Extended Self (Belk, 1988). There is evidence that fundamental representations of ownership emerge in early childhood (e.g., Ross, Friedman & Field, 2015). Ownership during development Children articulate and codify ownership rules in both verbal and non-verbal communication as early as 12 months of age. For example, infants correctly retrieved one of two balls that an experimenter labelled as "my ball" (Saylor, Ganea & Vazquez, 2011). Ownership terms first manifest around age 18 months, when toddlers begin to use personal pronouns referring to themselves (e.g., I, me, mine). They vary in frequency into the second and third years of life, when use of second person pronouns also appears (Hay, 2006; Lewis & Ramsay, 2004). Hay (2006) found that toddlers' use of first (e.g. "mine") and second person (e.g. "yours") possessive pronouns were correlated in 18 to 30 month olds, suggesting an emerging understanding of the concept of ownership, as opposed to a simple tendency to repeat the word "mine" when competing with peers for toys. From 24 months onward, children can identify and label objects that belong to themselves, their mother, or another individual (Fasig, 2000; Brownell, Iesue, Nichols & Svetlova, 2013). Object ownership recognition is also evident in nonverbal behaviour of toddlers: Ross et al (2015) gave 24-and 30-month old children toys and then had them free play in dyads