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LIT-1268: No causal link between changes in hand position sense and feeling of limb ownership in the rubber hand illusion

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StatusActive — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-992) in full; worth reading as the direct test of whether a change in felt hand position causes the feeling of owning the rubber hand. A motor slid the hidden real hand 8 cm toward or away from the rubber hand during stroking, too slowly to notice; pointing moved with it by about 5–6 cm, and questionnaire ownership did not change, in two experiments of 18. The authors conclude that drift is not a prerequisite of the illusion and is a process distinct from ownership, while still defending drift as a measure when the hand is immobile. Read it as a null result from 18 participants with no equivalence test, within distances (8–24 cm) where the illusion is known to work, and with some statistics that do not agree with their own test values.
Tagsself, neuroscience, embodied-cognition, psychometrics
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-992 — Abdulkarim & Ehrsson — No causal link between hand position sense and limb ownership
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-766 — Brushing a seen rubber hand in synchrony with the hidden real hand, against asynchronous brushing, raises reports that touch is felt at the rubber hand and, more weakly and less reliably, that the rubber hand is one's own; the proprioceptive drift toward the rubber hand that accompanies these reports is not a measure of them; the standard comparison conditions do not equalise participants' expectations, so whether the stimulation or the expectation produces the report difference is open, THEORY-827 — The rubber hand illusion is a perceptual illusion driven by multisensory integration: the difference in reports between synchronous and asynchronous brushing is produced by the stimulation, not by participants' expectations

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Abdulkarim, Z. & Ehrsson, H. H. (2016). No causal link between changes in hand position sense and feeling of limb ownership in the rubber hand illusion. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 78(2), 707–720 (online 10 November 2015). DOI 10.3758/s13414-015-1016-0.

Key takeaways

From the reading, NOTE-992.

  • Felt position moved; ownership did not. Sliding the hidden hand 8 cm toward or away from the rubber hand shifted pointing by about 5–6 cm in the same direction, yet the illusion index showed a main effect of synchrony only, with no effect of direction (p = .266) or of displacement against a static hand (p = .443).
  • So drift is not a cause of ownership. The results “suggest that proprioceptive drift is not a prerequisite for the illusion”. This closes the possibility Rohde et al. (2011) left open, within the distances tested.
  • The classic effect is reproduced. With the hand still, drift was greater after synchronous than asynchronous brushing, and the difference correlated with the difference in illusion strength (r = .562, p = .015).
  • Drift is kept as a measure, with caution. The authors argue it is “a valuable indirect measure” if the hand is immobile and it is used with other measures; they do not test the vision-only condition that carries Rohde et al.’s dissociation.
  • What the null can show. Eighteen participants, no equivalence test or Bayes factor, and distances of 8–24 cm, within the illusion’s known spatial range.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-20 at the owner’s request, among experimental works building on the rubber hand illusion. With Rohde, Di Luca & Ernst 2011 (LIT-1281) it answers the open question in NOTE-1006 and the “does not say what the drift measures” of THEORY-765 from the other side. Rohde et al. show drift without ownership; this study shows ownership unchanged when felt position is changed. Together they make drift a poor measure of ownership, though this paper defends its use in controlled designs. Read in full: Active.

It neither meets nor refutes THEORY-765: it replicates the synchrony effect on the questionnaire with named tests and effect sizes, but uses the same kind of control items the THEORY says are not a suggestion control. Its post-experiment questionnaire, in which 7 of 18 people reported hand movements that did not match the real one, is a small piece of evidence on compliance and confabulation. It bears on the drift clauses of THEORY-769 and THEORY-767, and only weakly on THEORY-769’s spatial term. Nothing whole-body was measured, so THEORY-768 is untouched. The NOTE sets this out.

Filed in parallel by other readers: Kalckert & Ehrsson 2012, which the authors cite for drift with one moving finger; Longo et al. 2008; and the work on demand characteristics and suggestion (Lush 2020; Lush et al. 2020; Ehrsson et al. 2022; Lush & Seth 2022; Roseboom & Lush 2022). It carries no instruction for machine-learning practice.

One of the sources of THEORY-766 (filed 2026-10-20), which restates the rubber hand synchrony effect as a difference in reports, separates drift from those reports, and leaves open whether expectation produces the difference.

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