Feeling pain from a rubber hand: Nociceptive drift in the rubber hand illusion
Sara Coppi, Karin Birgitta Jensen, H. Henrik Ehrsson · iScience · 2025
The sense of body ownership refers to the perceptual experience of one's body as one's own and can be studied using the rubber hand illusion (RHI). Body ownership relies on multisensory integration, although the relative contributions of different sensory modalities remain unclear. We investigated the role of nociception in body ownership using the nociceptive RHI (N-RHI), a version of the RHI triggered by noxious laser stimulation. Specifically, we assessed whether the N-RHI is as strong as the classic tactile RHI and whether both illusions induce a shift in perceived pain location toward the rubber hand ("nociceptive drift"). Our results reveal similarly strong questionnaire responses and proprioceptive drift in both illusions compared with the control conditions and show that both the tactile RHI and the N-RHI result in a significant nociceptive drift. These findings underscore the role of nociception in body ownership and highlight the multisensory nature of pain localization.