In Experiments 1 and 3, we used a 16-statement questionnaire (Table 1). Four statements referred to the feeling of ownership (e.g., “I felt as if I was looking at my own hand”), and four statements described sensations related to agency (e.g., “I felt as if was causing the movement I saw”). These statements were adopted from existing questionnaires used in traditional rubber hand illusion experiments (e.g., Botvinick and Cohen, 1998 (link); Longo et al., 2008 (link)). The remaining eight statements were control statements, with four for ownership and four for agency (e.g., “I felt as if I had more than one right hand” and “It seemed as if the rubber hand had a will of its own”). These served as controls for task compliancy, suggestibility, and expectancy effects. The control statements were created based on similar control statements used in earlier studies of the rubber hand illusion (e.g., Botvinick and Cohen, 1998 (link); Petkova and Ehrsson, 2008 (link)) in that they include statements that bear several similarities to the illusion-specific statements (e.g., includes the word “will” or “hand”) but do not capture the phenomenological experiences of ownership or agency. Participants were exposed to 3 min of stimulation for each individual condition, after which they reported their subjective experience on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from “−3” (totally disagree) to “+3” (totally agree), with “0” indicating neither agreement nor disagreement (“uncertain”). In Experiments 2 and 4, we applied a shorter version of the questionnaire to confirm the subjective experience of ownership and agency in these groups of participants. Here, we only included the most important statements related to the perceptions of ownership and agency, i.e., those that had displayed clear and reliable differences in the previous experiments, with the aim of examining possible correlations between the illusion categories and proprioceptive drift (see Table 1).
To analyze the questionnaire data, the average of the scores for the four statements related to ownership was computed to obtain a single “ownership statement” score. Similarly, the “agency statement” score was defined as the mean score of the four statements related to the sense of agency. The four control statements for ownership and agency were also averaged to obtain “ownership control statement” and “agency control statement” scores, respectively. Thus, references in the text to “ownership statements” or “agency statements” always refer to the average scores of the four individual statements in the original questionnaires unless explicitly stated otherwise. The ownership and agency statement scores were compared with their corresponding control statements. An average rating ≥ +1 indicates that on the group level, the participants affirmed the statement, i.e., they had experienced ownership or agency (this criterion has been used before; see Ehrsson et al., 2004 (link); Petkova and Ehrsson, 2009 (link)).