Hara Masayuki, Salomon Roy, van der Zwaag Wietske, Kober Tobias, Rognini Giulio, Nabae Hiroyuki, Yamamoto Akio, Blanke Olaf, Higuchi Toshiro
Department of Precision Engineering, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan.
Center for Neuroprosthetics, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne CH-1015, Switzerland; Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Brain Mind Institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne CH-1015, Switzerland.
J Neurosci Methods. 2014 Sep 30;235:25-34. doi: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2014.05.038. Epub 2014 Jun 9.
Bodily self-consciousness has become an important topic in cognitive neuroscience aiming to understand how the brain creates a unified sensation of the self in a body. Specifically, full body illusion (FBI) in which changes in bodily self-consciousness are experimentally introduced by using visual-tactile stimulation has led to improve understanding of these mechanisms. This paper introduces a novel approach to the classic FBI paradigm using a robotic master-slave system which allows us to examine interactions between action and the sense of body ownership in behavioral and MRI experiments. In the proposed approach, the use of the robotic master-slave system enables unique stimulation in which experimental participants can administer tactile cues on their own back using active self-touch. This active self-touch has never been employed in FBI experiments and it allows to test the role of sensorimotor integration and agency (the feeling of control over our actions) in FBI paradigms. The objective of this study is to propose a robotic-haptic platform allowing a new FBI paradigm including the active self-touch in MRI environments. This paper, first, describes the design concept and the performance of the prototype device in the fMRI environment (for 3T and 7T MRI scanners). In addition, the prototype device is applied to a classic FBI experiment, and we verify that the use of the prototype device succeeded in inducing the FBI. These results indicate that the proposed approach has a potential to drive advances in our understanding of human body ownership and agency by allowing novel manipulation and paradigms.
身体自我意识已成为认知神经科学中的一个重要课题，旨在了解大脑如何在身体中创造出统一的自我感觉。具体而言，全身错觉（FBI）通过视觉-触觉刺激在实验中引入身体自我意识的变化，这有助于增进对这些机制的理解。本文介绍了一种使用机器人主从系统对经典FBI范式的新方法，该系统使我们能够在行为和MRI实验中研究动作与身体所有权感之间的相互作用。在所提出的方法中，机器人主从系统的使用实现了独特的刺激，实验参与者可以通过主动自我触摸在自己的背部施加触觉线索。这种主动自我触摸从未在FBI实验中使用过，它能够测试感觉运动整合和能动性（对我们动作的控制感）在FBI范式中的作用。本研究的目的是提出一个机器人触觉平台，以实现一种新的FBI范式，包括在MRI环境中的主动自我触摸。本文首先描述了功能磁共振成像环境（适用于3T和7T MRI扫描仪）中原型设备的设计概念和性能。此外，将该原型设备应用于经典的FBI实验，我们验证了原型设备的使用成功诱导出了FBI。这些结果表明，所提出的方法有潜力通过允许新的操作和范式推动我们对人体所有权和能动性的理解取得进展。
