Following the amputation of a limb, many amputees report that they can still vividly perceive its presence despite conscious knowledge that it is not physically there. However, our ability to probe the mental representation of this experience is limited by the intractable and often distressing pain associated with amputation. Here, we present a method for eliciting phantom-like experiences in non-amputees using a variation of the rubber hand illusion in which a finger has been removed from the rubber hand. An interpretative phenomenological analysis revealed that the structure of this experience shares a wide range of sensory attributes with subjective reports of phantom limb experience. For example, when the space where the ring finger should have been on the rubber hand was stroked, 93% of participants (i.e., 28/30) reported the vivid presence of a finger that they could not see and a total of 57% (16/28) of participants who felt that the finger was present reported one or more additional sensory qualities such as tingling or numbness (25%; 7/28) and alteration in the perceived size of the finger (50%; 14/28). These experiences indicate the adaptability of body experience and share some characteristics of the way that phantom limbs are described. Participants attributed changes to the shape and size of their "missing" finger to the way in which the experimenter mimed stroking in the area occupied by the missing finger. This alteration of body perception is similar to the phenomenon of telescoping experienced by people with phantom limbs and suggests that our sense of embodiment not only depends on internal body representations but on perceptual information coming from peripersonal space.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00600 | DOI Listing |
J Cogn
January 2025
General Psychology, Trier University, Germany.
Observations from multisensory body illusions indicate that the body representation can be adapted to changing task demands, e.g., it can be expanded to integrate external objects based on current sensorimotor experience (embodiment).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPolymers (Basel)
December 2024
College of Mechanical Engineering, Taiyuan University of Technology, Taiyuan 030024, China.
Rubber is widely used in situations involving cyclic loads, and the influence of temperature on rubber properties is particularly pronounced under cyclic loading. In this study, mechanical property tests and crack propagation tests of carbon black-filled hydrogenated nitrile butadiene rubber were conducted at four different operating temperatures. Based on the results of the crack propagation tests, the temperature-dependent characteristics of the Paris-Erdogan parameters and strain energy density were clarified.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Psychol
December 2024
Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University, Higashihiroshima, Hiroshima, Japan.
Sense of body ownership has been studied using rubber hand illusion (RHI) and full-body illusion (FBI). It has recently become clear that consciously interpreting a fake body as one's own in a top-down manner influences these body illusions. Furthermore, a study interestingly found that the influence of top-down interpretation was moderated by the degree of depersonalization, which was a symptom of a lack of sense of body ownership.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeuropsychopharmacol Hung
December 2024
Pszichiátriai és Pszichoterápiás Klinika, Semmelweis Egyetem, Budapest.
Small
January 2025
State Key Laboratory of Solid Lubrication, Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou, 730000, China.
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