Children’s Responses to the Rubber-Hand Illusion Reveal Dissociable Pathways in Body Representation

Cowie, Dorothy; Makin, Tamar R. and Bremner, Andrew J.. 2013. Children’s Responses to the Rubber-Hand Illusion Reveal Dissociable Pathways in Body Representation. Psychological Science, 24(5), pp. 762-769. ISSN 0956-7976 [Article]

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Abstract or Description

The bodily self is constructed from multisensory information. However, little is known of the relation between multisensory development and the emerging sense of self. We investigated this question by measuring the strength of the rubber-hand illusion in young children (4 to 9 years old) and adults. Intermanual pointing showed that children were as sensitive as adults to visual-tactile synchrony cues for hand position, which indicates that a visual-tactile pathway to the bodily self matures by at least 4 years of age. However, regardless of synchrony cues, children’s perceived hand position was closer to the rubber hand than adults’ perceived hand position was. This indicates a second, later-maturing process based on visual-proprioceptive information. Furthermore, explicit feelings of embodiment were related only to the visual-tactile process. These findings demonstrate two dissociable processes underlying body representation in early life, and they call into question current models of body representation and ownership in adulthood.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612462902

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Psychology
Research Office > REF2014

Dates:

DateEvent
May 2013Published

Item ID:

7222

Date Deposited:

29 Aug 2012 13:59

Last Modified:

30 Oct 2017 13:01

Peer Reviewed:

Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.

URI:

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/7222

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