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Body ownership and multisensory perception — Affective (slow) touch in a virtual-reality full-body illusion

Submitted 2026-10-22

Field: Computer Science › Human-Computer InteractionType: Couldn't replicate a published resultArea: body ownership and multisensory perceptionTarget: Affective (slow) touch in a virtual-reality full-body illusionStage: replication

Hypothesis

Slow, affective stroking would strengthen ownership of a virtual body more than fast stroking, as it does for the rubber hand illusion.

What failed

A first study found more subjective ownership with slow (3 cm/s) than fast (30 cm/s) stroking. A second study again found the usual synchronous-versus-asynchronous effect but did not reproduce the slow-versus-fast difference, so the authors could not conclude that affective touch enhances the full-body illusion.

Broken assumption

The affective-touch boost seen for a rubber hand transfers reliably to ownership of a whole virtual body.

Why

The abstract does not explain the discrepancy between the two studies and calls for further research.

From the published paper: Jong et al. Experimental Brain Research, 2017. ↗CC BY

Research ideas from this failure

Unvetted lead — read the papers

New hypotheses this failure suggests, each with a crucial experiment, a rival explanation of the original result, and the papers it rests on. Written by AI from paper titles and abstracts found on OpenAlex (and Europe PMC, for life and health sciences).

Related failures (1)

Matched on shared genes, mechanisms and ways of failing as well as wording. Each shows why it matched — treat these as leads rather than verdicts.

virtual reality and telepresenceVirtual arms in 360-degree-camera immersive telepresencedifferent research area
Showing users a virtual body that mirrors their own arm movements during immersive telepresence would increase their sense of presence and their preference for the experience.
A 20-person pilot found more presence and preference with the virtual body, but a preregistered confirmatory study with 62 participants did not reproduce this; only behavioural measures hinted at higher presence.
Why it matched: similar wording · failed the same way: Held in the model species, not beyond it

Links in published research

Where this experiment's genes are known to matter outside its own research area, and the papers behind those links. Sources: Open Targets Platform and Europe PMC.