Metacontrol and body ownership: divergent thinking increases the virtual hand illusion ... - 0 views
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The virtual hand illusion (VHI) paradigm demonstrates that people tend to perceive agency and bodily ownership for a virtual hand that moves in synchrony with their own movements. Given that this kind of effect can be taken to reflect self–other integration (i.e., the integration of some external, novel event into the representation of oneself), and given that self–other integration has been previously shown to be affected by metacontrol states (biases of information processing towards persistence/selectivity or flexibility/integration), we tested whether the VHI varies in size depending on the metacontrol bias. Persistence and flexibility biases were induced by having participants carry out a convergent thinking (Remote Associates) task or divergent-thinking (Alternate Uses) task, respectively, while experiencing a virtual hand moving synchronously or asynchronously with their real hand. Synchrony-induced agency and ownership effects were more pronounced in the context of divergent thinking than in the context of convergent thinking, suggesting that a metacontrol bias towards flexibility promotes self–other integration.
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As in previous studies, participants were more likely to experience subjective agency and ownership for a virtual hand if it moved in synchrony with their own, real hand. As predicted, the size of this effect was significantly moderated by the type of creativity task in the context of which the illusion was induced.
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It is important to keep in mind the fact that our present findings were obtained in a paradigm that strongly interleaved what we considered the task prime (i.e., the particular creativity task) and the induction of the VHI—the process we aimed to prime. The practical reason to do so was to increase the probability that the metacontrol state that the creativity tasks were hypothesized to induce or establish would be sufficiently close in time to the synchrony manipulation to have an impact on the thereby induced changes in self-perception. However, this implies that we are unable to disentangle the effects of the task prime proper and the effects of possible interactions between this task prime and the synchrony manipulation. There are indeed reasons to assume that such interactions are not unlikely to have occurred
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