Self beyond the body: task-relevant distal cues modulate performance and body ownership

The understanding of Body Ownership (BO) largely relies on the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) where synchronous stroking of real and Rubber Hands (RH) leads to an illusion of ownership of RH provided physical, anatomical, postural and spatial plausibility of the two body-parts. RHI also occurs during visuomotor synchrony, in particular, when the visual feedback of virtual arm movements follows the trajectory of the instantiated motor command. Hence BO seems to result from a bottom-up integration of afferent and efferent proximal multisensory evidence, and top-down prediction of both externally and self-generated signals, which occurs when the predictions about upcoming sensory signals are accurate. In motor control, the differential processing of predicted and actual sensory consequences of self-generated actions is addressed by, the so-called, Forward Model (FM). Based on an efference copy or corollary discharge, FM issues predictions about the sensory consequences of motor commands and compares them with the actual outcome. The discrepancies (Sensory Prediction Errors, SPEs) are used to correct the action on the consecutive trial and provide new estimates of the current state of the body and the environment. Here, we propose that BO might be computed by FMs, and therefore, it might depend on their consistency, specifically, in contexts where the sensory feedback is self-generated. Crucially, to reduce SPE, FMs integrate both proximal (proprioceptive) and distal (vision, audition) sensory cues relevant to the task. Thus, if BO depends on the consistency of FMs, it would be compromised by the incongruency of not only proximal but also distal cues. To test our hypothesis, we devised an embodied VR-based task where action outcomes were signaled by distinct auditory cues. By manipulating the cues with respect to their spatiotemporal congruency and valence, we show that distal feedback which violates predictions about action outcomes compromises both BO and performance. These results demonstrate that BO is influenced by not only efferent and afferent cues which pertain to the body itself but also those arising outside of the body and suggest that in goal-oriented tasks BO might result from a computation of FM.