• Ke Ma and Bernhard Hommel.
• Leiden University, Institute for Psychological Research & Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden, The Netherlands. Electronic address: k.ma@fsw.leidenuniv.nl.
• Conscious Cogn. 2015 Nov 1; 36: 75-86.

AbstractRubber-hand and virtual-hand illusions show that people can perceive body ownership for objects under suitable conditions. Bottom-up approaches assume that perceived ownership emerges from multisensory matching (e.g., between seen object and felt hand movements), whereas top-down approaches claim that novel body parts are integrated only if they resemble some part of a permanent internal body representation. We demonstrate that healthy adults perceive body ownership for a virtual balloon changing in size, and a virtual square changing in size or color, in synchrony with movements of their real hand. This finding is inconsistent with top-down approaches and amounts to an existence proof that non-corporeal events can be perceived as body parts if their changes are systematically related to one's actions. It also implies that previous studies with passive-stimulation techniques might have underestimated the plasticity of body representations and put too much emphasis on the resemblance between viewed object and real hand.Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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