Analysis of Electromyography and Skin Conductance Response during Rubber Hand Illusion

Abstract

Recently, the rubber hand illusion (RHI), which is one of phenomena that the sense of ownership (SOO) is extended to the objects over the external area, attracts much attention to explain the brain mechanism of self body recognition of human. However, most previous research have only focused on the conditions for the occurrence of the RHI. In this study, we measured electromyography (EMG) of the arm and skin conductance response (SCR) of the end of the finger when the strong hit with a hammer is given to the fake hand in order to examine whether the RHI is in fact occurred at a certain time during the experiment. As a result, we showed that the measurement of EMG could satisfy above requirement. Also, it is implied that the measurement of EMG gets closer to the same tendency of subject's introspection report than that of SCR.