At ESCAN (European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience) 2026, I noticed that researchers across different areas of neuroscience kept returning to the same experimental tool: the rubber hand illusion. In this illusion, a participant’s real hand is hidden while a rubber hand is placed in view; when both are stroked in synchrony, participants experience the sensation that the rubber hand belongs to them, and often sense that their real hand has shifted towards it. This result is taken as evidence that the brain actively constructs body ownership by integrating visual, tactile and proprioceptive signals.
Seeing a clinician, a social psychologist and a virtual reality (VR) researcher each using the rubber hand illusion to study very different questions made me want to investigate what this illusion reveals about how the self is built. Traditionally, psychologists studying the ‘self’ only focused on the mind (that is, memories, beliefs and narratives), while the body was treated as mere background, and its role in shaping self-experience was often overlooked. In a review published two decades after their original paper on the rubber hand illusion, Tsakiris and Haggard revisit that early work to highlight how it addressed this gap.
They trace how the paradigm they introduced has since become a tool across multiple fields for investigating how the body contributes to self-experience. This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution Receive 12 digital issues and online access to articles Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout Tsakiris, M. & Haggard, P. Body ownership and the experimental psychology of the self.
Perform. 51, 979–989 https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0001281 (2025) Tsakiris, M. & Haggard, P. The rubber hand illusion revisited: visuotactile integration and self-attribution. Perform. 31, 80–91 https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.31.1.80 (2005) Maister, L., Sebanz, N., Knoblich, G. & Tsakiris, M.
Experiencing ownership over a dark-skinned body reduces implicit racial bias. Cognition 128, 170–178 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.04.002 (2013) Article PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK The author declares no competing interests. The role of the body in generating the self.
Nat Rev Psychol (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-026-00619-1 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-026-00619-1
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