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 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 the electromyography (EMG) of the arm and the skin conductance response (SCR) of the end of the finger when the strong blow with a hammer would be given to the fake hand in order to examine whether the RHI is in fact occurred to the subject at a certain time during the experiment. As a result, we showed that the measurement of the EMG could satisfy above requirement and it is implied that the measurement of EMG gets closer to the tendency of introspection report than that of SCR.