Whose hand is this?” Exploring factors influencing hand ownership in healthy and clinical populations

A specific aspect of bodily self-awareness is the sense of body ownership, defined as the subjective experience of one's body as its own. Despite the great amount of work on the topic, it is still not clear which factors determines the emergence of body ownership and how these signals interact. The aim of the present work is to provide new insights on the contribution of skin temperature (Chapter 1), hand laterality (Chapter 2) and the experience of touch (Chapter 3) to the construction of the sense of body ownership. In order to achieve this result, seven different experimental studies were conducted on healthy subjects and neurological patients affected by a pathological alteration of the sense of ownership. The findings of the present thesis demonstrate the importance of the orchestration of not only exteroceptive (e.g., vision, touch) but also proprioceptive (e.g., position and movement of the body), cognitive (e.g., belief about one’s own body) and autonomic signals (i.e., body temperature) in maintaining a coherent sense of body ownership.