Hohwy, J. & Paton, B. (2010). Explaining away the body: experiences of supernaturally caused touch and touch on non-hand objects within the rubber hand illusion. PLoS ONE 5(2), e9416. DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0009416. PMCID PMC2827559.
Key takeaways
From the reading, NOTE-998.
- An illusion with no proprioceptive gap. The foreign arm was shown in a head-mounted display exactly where the participant’s own arm lay. Synchronous tapping raised ratings of “Is it as if the touch you can feel is produced by the finger you can see and on the arm you can see?” to means of +1.0 and +1.8, against −2.5 and −2.2 under asynchrony, on a −3 to +3 scale, and the rating held through pauses of 10, 30 and 60 s (13 people).
- The illusion absorbs odd input. After onset, synchrony raised ratings that a finger held 5 cm off a rubber arm caused the felt touch, and that touch was caused on a cardboard box (21 people in two groups; synchronous mean 1.03, asynchronous −2.06). Open-ended reports of the hovering finger included “It’s ESP” and “It is black magic”.
- The box needs prior onset. Shown the box from the start, nine people gave no significant synchrony difference. The authors offer this to reconcile Armel & Ramachandran’s table-top result with Tsakiris & Haggard’s failure for non-hand objects. The inference rests on a null in nine people, with no values reported.
- The temperature result is weak. The real hand was 0.13 °C cooler under synchrony in one of four comparisons (t(12) = −1.84, p = .04, which is the one-tailed value), not in the 30 s comparison and not in experiments 2 and 3. No question asked about ownership of the arm.
- The interpretation. Ongoing solutions to visuotactile conflict lower the probability of the model of the visual body image, which is “explained away”. Healthy people who reach for supernatural explanations of odd sensory input are offered as support for one-deficit theories of delusion. Both are the authors’ readings; the paper fits no model.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-20 at the owner’s request for experimental work building on the rubber hand illusion. Read in full from the open-access version of record: Active.
It is one of the two studies Apps & Tsakiris (LIT-1262) cite for cooling of the real hand, the evidence THEORY-769 has for its clause that the real part loses ownership as another object gains it. The reading finds that evidence thinner than the citation suggests: a 0.13 °C difference in one comparison of four, with no ownership measure. That THEORY’s promote_when already asks for a measure other than temperature, so its standing does not change. The box result bears on the same THEORY’s prior and on the body-likeness constraint of Lenggenhager et al. (LIT-1279) behind THEORY-768, but it is a rating of caused touch, not of ownership or self-identification. Its synchrony effect is a further report difference of the kind THEORY-766 describes, with only an asynchronous control and no expectation measure, which that THEORY says cannot settle it. Nothing in it bears on THEORY-767 or on THEORY-458’s ownership–agency split. The NOTE sets this out. It carries no instruction for machine-learning practice.