Body ownership promotes visual awareness

Abstract
Article and author information
Metrics

Abstract

The sense of ownership of one’s body is important for survival, e.g., in defending the body against a threat. However, in addition to affecting behavior, it also affects perception of the world. In the case of visuospatial perception, it has been shown that the sense of ownership causes external space to be perceptually scaled according to the size of the body. Here, we investigated the effect of ownership on another fundamental aspect of visual perception: visual awareness. In two binocular rivalry experiments, we manipulated the sense of ownership of a stranger’s hand through visuotactile stimulation while that hand was one of the rival stimuli. The results show that ownership, but not mere visuotactile stimulation, increases the dominance of the hand percept. This effect is due to a combination of longer perceptual dominance durations and shorter suppression durations. Together, these results suggest that the sense of body ownership promotes visual awareness.

Article and author information

Author details

Björn van der Hoort

Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

For correspondence
bjorn.van.der.hoort@ki.se

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-2346-8373
Maria Reingardt

Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
H. Henrik Ehrsson

Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Funding

This research was made possible by funding from the Swedish Research Council, the James McDonnell Foundation, Söderbergska Stiftelsen, and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: Each participant signed an informed consent form before the onset of the experiment. The Regional Ethical Review Board of Stockholm approved the experimental procedures.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.