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LIT-1281: The Rubber Hand Illusion: Feeling of Ownership and Proprioceptive Drift Do Not Go Hand in Hand

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StatusActive — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1009) in full; worth reading as the study that broke the assumed tie between proprioceptive drift and the feeling of owning the rubber hand. With robot-delivered stroking and a visual probe of felt finger position, drift toward the rubber hand appeared under synchronous stroking, under no stroking at all (only seeing the hand), and under asynchronous stroking interrupted every 10 s, at levels not significantly different from synchronous stroking (about 5–6 cm); only continuous asynchronous stroking kept it near zero. Ownership, by questionnaire, needed synchrony. The authors conclude that drift comes from visuo-proprioceptive integration that asynchrony suppresses, and that "conclusions about feelings of ownership cannot be drawn from measuring proprioceptive drift alone". Read it as groups of 10, a visual-judgement measure rather than reaching, and an Experiment 2 whose ownership evidence is anecdotal debriefing, not a questionnaire.
Tagsself, neuroscience, embodied-cognition, psychometrics
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1009 — Rohde, Di Luca & Ernst — Feeling of ownership and proprioceptive drift do not go hand in hand
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

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Rohde, M., Di Luca, M. & Ernst, M. O. (2011). The rubber hand illusion: feeling of ownership and proprioceptive drift do not go hand in hand. PLoS ONE 6(6), e21659. DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0021659.

Key takeaways

From the reading, NOTE-1009.

  • Drift without ownership. Felt finger position drifted toward the rubber hand as far when the hand was only seen (6.47 cm) as under synchronous stroking (about 6 cm), and the two drifts correlated within participants (r = 0.49). Participants did not report owning the hand in the vision-only condition, though that report is anecdotal.
  • Asynchrony, not synchrony, makes the difference. Continuous asynchronous stroking for 120 s held drift at 0.98 cm against 5.9 cm synchronous. Interrupted every 10 s for measurement, asynchronous stroking gave as much drift as synchronous, while the questionnaire in Experiment 1 still showed ownership only for synchrony.
  • The proposed mechanism. Seeing a hand near one’s own pulls felt position toward it by default; prolonged asynchrony is evidence against the “unity assumption” that vision and proprioception belong together, and halts that integration. Ownership comes from a different, visuotactile process.
  • Drift is not a proxy. “Conclusions about feelings of ownership cannot be drawn from measuring proprioceptive drift alone”, and the same caution applies to physiological and neural correlates.
  • Limits. Groups of ten; a visual probe of finger position, which the authors do not claim generalises to reaching; and in Experiment 2, where the critical vision-only condition was run, ownership was not measured by questionnaire.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-20 at the owner’s request, among experimental works building on the rubber hand illusion. It answers, in part, an open question the record already asked twice: NOTE-1006 (Botvinick & Cohen 1998, LIT-1277) asks whether drift measures ownership or only visuo-proprioceptive recalibration, and THEORY-765 says it “does not say what the drift measures”. This study’s answer is that drift, measured this way, tracks seeing the hand and is suppressed by prolonged asynchrony, not produced by the illusion. Read in full: Active.

It meets the second refutation condition of THEORY-765 for the drift half of that THEORY, in one laboratory with small groups, and leaves the questionnaire half standing; it has no suggestion control. It bears on the drift clauses in the promote_when of THEORY-769 and THEORY-767, which count drift as a measure of ownership, and by analogy on the drift measure of self-location in Lenggenhager et al. 2007 (LIT-1279), which THEORY-768 leans on. It is a worked case for QUESTION-048: a behavioural measure that correlated with report turned out to dissociate from it. The NOTE sets this out.

Read with it: Abdulkarim & Ehrsson 2016 (LIT-1268), which manipulates felt hand position directly and finds ownership unchanged, the converse dissociation. Filed in parallel by other readers: Longo et al. 2008, Kalckert & Ehrsson 2012, 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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