Some people report localised pain on their body when seeing other people in pain (sensory-localised vicarious pain responders). In this study we assess whether this is related to atypical computations of body ownership which, in paradigms such as the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI), can be conceptualised as a Bayesian inference as to whether multiple sources of sensory information (visual, somatosensory) belong together on a single body (one’s own) or are distributed across several bodies (vision=other, somatosensory=self). According to this model, computations of body ownership depend on the degree (and precision) of sensory evidence, rather than synchrony per se. Sensory-localised vicarious pain responders exhibit the RHI following synchronous stroking and – unusually – also after asynchronous stroking. Importantly, this occurs only in asynchronous conditions in which the stroking is predictable (alternating) rather than unpredictable (random). There was no evidence that their bottom-up proprioceptive signals are less precise, suggesting individual differences in the top-down weighting of sensory evidence. Finally, the Enfacement illusion (EI) was also employed as a conceptually-related bodily illusion paradigm that involves a completely different response judgment (based on vision rather than proprioception). Sensory-localised responders show a comparable pattern on this task after synchronous and asynchronous stroking. This is consistent with the idea that they have top-down (prior) differences in the way body ownership is inferred that transcends the exact judgment being made (visual or proprioceptive).

有些人在看到其他人疼痛时报告自己身体局部疼痛（感觉局部替代疼痛反应者）。在这项研究中，我们评估这是否与身体所有权的非典型计算有关，在橡胶手错觉（RHI）等范式中，可以将其概念化为关于多种感官信息源（视觉、体感）是否属于贝叶斯推断。一起在一个身体上（自己的）或分布在多个身体上（视觉=其他，体感=自我）。根据这个模型，身体所有权的计算取决于感官证据的程度（和精度），而不是同步本身。感觉局部替代疼痛反应器在同步抚摸后表现出 RHI，但不寻常的是，在异步抚摸后也表现出 RHI。重要的是，这种情况仅发生在异步条件下，其中抚摸是可预测的（交替的）而不是不可预测的（随机的）。没有证据表明他们的自下而上的本体感受信号不太精确，这表明感官证据的自上而下的权重存在个体差异。最后，面貌错觉（EI）也被用作概念上相关的身体错觉范例，涉及完全不同的反应判断（基于视觉而不是本体感觉）。在同步和异步抚摸之后，感觉局部响应者在这项任务上表现出类似的模式。这与他们在推断身体所有权的方式上存在自上而下（先验）差异的想法是一致的，这种差异超越了所做的确切判断（视觉或本体感觉）。