Relationship between sensitivity to visuotactile temporal discrepancy and the rubber hand illusion

• We investigated relationship between RHI and visual feedback delay detection.
• The proprioceptive drift in RHI experiment declined linearly as the delay increased.
• Delay detection rate was better fitted by a non-linear function of delay length.
• Proprioceptive drift and delay detection reflect different aspects of body processing.

The rubber-hand illusion (RHI) is that the subject feels the visually presented tactile stimulation of an artificial (rubber) hand as their own tactile sensation and is caused by stimulating the rubber and real hands synchronously. Our previous study showed that the RHI was greatly reduced as the visual feedback delay of the tactile stimulation of the hand became longer. In the present study, we investigate the relationship between the attenuation of the RHI and the detection of the delay in two experiments: (1) an RHI experiment and (2) a visuotactile asynchrony detection experiment, in which the subjects underwent tactile stimulation of their hand and judged whether visual feedback was consistent with the touch sensation. In line with our previous study, the RHI was significantly reduced as the delay lengthened. Interestingly, proprioceptive drift declined linearly as the delay increased, while the delay detection rate was better fitted by a non-linear (logistic) function. The illusion score showed the intermittent pattern. We suggest that proprioceptive drift is relevant to the processing of the body schema, whereas the delay detection and the subjective feeling of the RHI are more related to the body image processing.