Activity of the inferior parietal cortex is modulated by visual feedback delay in the robot hand illusion

The robot hand illusion (RoHI) is the perception of self-ownership and self-agency of a virtual (robot) hand that moves consistently with one’s own. The phenomenon shows that self-attribution can be established via temporal integration of visual and movement information. Our previous study showed that participants felt significantly greater RoHI (sense of self-ownership and sense of self-agency) when visuomotor temporal discrepancies were less than 200 ms. A weaker RoHI effect (sense of self-agency only) was observed when temporal discrepancies were between 300 and 500 ms. Here, we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate brain activity associated with the RoHI under different visual feedback delays (100 ms, 400 ms, 700 ms). We found that the angular and supramarginal gyri exhibited significant activation in the 100-ms feedback condition. ANOVA indicated a significant difference between the 100-ms condition and the other conditions (p < 0.01). These results demonstrate that activity in the posterior parietal cortex was modulated by the delay between the motor command and the visual feedback of the virtual hand movements. Thus, we propose that the inferior parietal cortex is essential for integrating motor and visual information to distinguish one’s own body from others.