Body ownership and the experimental psychology of the self.

Abstract

Human experimental psychology seems inextricably bound up with a notion of self, or individual mental life. The link between self and body has always been acknowledged, but psychologists have few ways to investigate, analyze, or understand this link. As 2025 marks the 50th birthday of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance and 20 years since the publication of our "Re-Visiting the Rubber Hand Illusion" article in the journal, we take this opportunity to reflect on the impact, reach, and major developments that followed its publication. In particular, we focus on how the methods and theoretical constructs from our article have extended the concepts of bodily self-awareness toward other fields beyond experimental psychology. Our article helped to develop experimental approaches to understanding the role of the body in self-awareness, and mental life more generally. The combination of rigorous experimental methods and a clear theoretical model has allowed psychologists to have a clearer view of the relation between body and self. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).