Illusory hand ownership induced by an MRI compatible immersive virtual reality device

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a virtual reality based setup for triggering and studying illusory sensations of limb ownership as known from the popular rubber hand illusion. Unlike a similar setup introduced recently, this experiment is triggered by software automatically, which provides for a good synchrony and for high accuracy of visuotactile stimulation. The system is usable inside a magnetic resonance scanner which allows observing cortical activations at the same time. We tested two participants, one highly and the other lowly susceptible to the induction of illusory limb ownership, assessing their subjective experiences as well as their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We present pre-liminary results suggesting that our setup induces illusory ownership experiences for a virtual limb successfully, accom-panied by neuronal activation in integrative brain areas. © 2012 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston.