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LIT-1273: Moving a Rubber Hand that Feels Like Your Own: A Dissociation of Ownership and Agency

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Properties4
StatusActive — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-993) in full; worth reading as the first experiment to set the sense of ownership and the sense of agency against each other in one rubber hand paradigm. A wooden model hand whose index finger is linked by a rod to the participant's hidden finger is owned when it moves in time with the real finger, whether the movement is the participant's own or imposed by the experimenter, and is controlled when the participant moves, whether or not it is owned: passive movement removed agency and left ownership, and rotating the model hand 180° removed ownership and left agency. Read it as 104 participants over four between-group experiments, with named non-parametric tests, means and SDs but no standardised effect sizes, a dissociation shown on questionnaires alone (drift measures ownership only), and no control for what participants expected the conditions to do. It also finds the two not independent: agency was rated higher, and correlated with ownership, only when the hand was owned.
Tagsself, agency, embodied-cognition, neuroscience
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-993 — Kalckert & Ehrsson — Moving a rubber hand that feels like your own
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-458 — Within the minimal self, the sense that a movement or a thought is mine and the sense that I am its source are distinct and come apart, as in involuntary movement and thought insertion; on Frith's comparator model the sense of agency depends on a forward model that precedes action and ownership on sensory feedback, so failed forward monitoring would explain thought insertion and, by the same mechanism, why first-person reference ordinarily cannot misidentify its subject, THEORY-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

Graph View

Kalckert, A. & Ehrsson, H. H. (2012). Moving a rubber hand that feels like your own: a dissociation of ownership and agency. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6, 40. DOI 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00040.

Key takeaways

From the reading, NOTE-993.

  • A moving rubber hand is owned. When a model finger moves in time with one’s own hidden finger, the model hand is rated as one’s own and the felt position of the real finger drifts toward it (1.73 cm against −0.35 cm under asynchrony). Drift correlated with ownership ratings (r = 0.56, n = 17) and not with agency ratings.
  • Ownership without agency. When the experimenter moved both fingers together, ownership stayed (1.57) and agency went (−0.61). Drift did not differ between active and passive movement.
  • Agency without ownership. With the model hand rotated 180°, active movement still gave agency (2.2) but not ownership (−0.62), and no drift. The authors call this the first direct demonstration of a double dissociation in one rubber hand paradigm.
  • Synchrony is needed for both. A ~500 ms asynchrony removed ownership and agency together.
  • Not independent. Agency was higher when the hand was in an anatomical position, even in passive conditions, and correlated with ownership only when the hand was owned and moved actively. The authors read this as a distinct “body agency” beside agency over external objects, on indirect evidence.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-20 at the owner’s request for experimental work building on the rubber hand illusion that bears on the batch’s accounts of bodily self-consciousness. Read in full from the open-access version of record: Active.

It is the record’s first primary experiment on the sense of agency, and the first in which ownership and agency are manipulated against each other. It bears most on THEORY-458: it shows the two senses coming apart outside involuntary movement, in the direction involuntary movement cannot give (agency without ownership), which answers one of that THEORY’s refutation routes, though not its comparator or thought-insertion half. It extends the synchrony effect of THEORY-765 from brushing to movement, with drift absent under asynchrony and under an incongruent posture, but has no expectation control. Its passive condition is the “adults whose agency is intact but unused” kind of evidence that THEORY-768 says cannot settle its agency thesis, and it measures hand ownership only. It gives Haggard’s (LIT-1009, NOTE-827) point that involuntary movement brings ownership without agency an experimental instance, and its residual agency under asynchrony is weak, explicit-only support for THEORY-322’s prospective component. The NOTE sets this out.

Filed alongside, in the 2026-10-20 batch of experimental work on the rubber hand illusion, by sibling readers: Lush 2020 and Lush et al. 2020 on demand characteristics and phenomenological control, the exchange between Ehrsson et al. 2022 and Lush & Seth 2022, Roseboom & Lush 2022, Rohde, Di Luca & Ernst 2011 on proprioceptive drift, Abdulkarim & Ehrsson 2015, and Longo et al. 2008 on the questionnaire’s structure. This paper cites Rohde et al. for not relying on drift alone and Longo et al. for its questionnaire items.

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.

Added on 2026-10-20 as a source of THEORY-458, for agency without ownership outside involuntary movement; that THEORY’s comparator half is untouched.

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