The rubber hand illusion in children: What are we measuring?

Abstract

The rubber hand illusion (RHI) is a much-studied bodily illusion that has been used in a wide number of populations to investigate the plasticity of the mental body representation. In adult participants, the wide adoption of the illusion has led to a proliferation of experimental variations of the illusion, and with that, considerable apparent inconsistencies in both empirical results and conceptual interpretations. In turn, this makes it challenging to integrate empirical findings and to identify what those findings together can tell us about the representation of the body in the brain. More recently, scientists have started applying the illusion to populations of children, in order to bett..