Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Neurological evidence has shown that brain damages canselectively impair the ability to discriminate between objectsbelonging to others and those that we feel are our own. Despitethe ubiquity and relevance of this sense of object ownership forour life, the underlying cognitive mechanisms are still poorlyunderstood. Here we ask whether psychological ownership ofan object can be based on its incorporation in one’s body image.To explore this possibility with healthy participants, weemployed a modified version of the rubber hand illusion inwhich both the participant and the rubber hand wore a ring. Weused the self-prioritization effect in a perceptual matching taskas an indirect measure of the sense of (dis)ownership overobjects. Results indicate that undermining the bodily self hascascade effects on the representation of owned objects, at leastfor those associated with the body for a long time.