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. 2025 May 11;16(3):20416695251335161.
doi: 10.1177/20416695251335161. eCollection 2025 May-Jun.

The curious transference of sensations in the 'mismatched-palm' rubber hand illusion

Nicholas Christos  1 , Jen Mulholland, Margaret O'Leary, Rebekah C White
Affiliations

The curious transference of sensations in the 'mismatched-palm' rubber hand illusion

Nicholas Christos et al. Iperception. .

Abstract

We describe a disconcerting illusion. The participant looks at the palm of a left rubber hand being touched while receiving synchronous touch on the back of their own hidden right hand. Despite postural incongruence, mismatching handedness and touch being at a different location on the viewed and hidden hands, participants experience the illusion of ownership of the rubber hand and the illusion of feeling touch on the rubber hand. The robustness of the rubber hand illusion to seemingly profound incongruencies is explained with reference to Riemer et al.'s four basic principles for successful embodiment.

Keywords: body perception; haptics/touch; perception; somatosensory; visuo-haptic interactions.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
(Left panel) paradigm set–up. Viewed left rubber hand positioned palm facing up with the participant's right hand positioned palm facing down; and vision of the participant's right hand precluded by way of a visual divider – in this case a lunch tray from the College Hall! (Right panel) results of rubber hand questionnaire administered following 120–s synchronous and 120–s asynchronous stimulation (order randomised). The top five questions – as presented on the figure – are control questions and the bottom two questions capture experience of the illusion (order of presentation was randomised). Error bars represent 1 SEM.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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