Grabherr Luzia, Russek Leslie N, Bellan Valeria, Shohag Mohammad, Camfferman Danny, Moseley G Lorimer
School of Health Sciences, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia.
Psychiatric Liaison Service, University Hospital of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
PeerJ. 2019 Jul 26;7:e7201. doi: 10.7717/peerj.7201. eCollection 2019.
Bodily self-consciousness depends on the coherent integration of sensory information. In addition to visual and somatosensory information processing, vestibular contributions have been proposed and investigated. Vestibular information seems especially important for self-location, but remains difficult to study.
This randomised controlled experiment used the MIRAGE multisensory illusion box to induce a conflict between the visually- and proprioceptively-encoded position of one hand. Over time, the perceived location of the hand slowly shifts, due to the fact that proprioceptive input is progressively weighted more heavily than the visual input. We hypothesised that left cold caloric vestibular stimulation (CVS) augments this shift in hand localisation.
The results from 24 healthy participants do not support our hypothesis: CVS had no effect on the estimations with which the perceived position of the hand shifted from the visually- to the proprioceptively-encoded position. Participants were more likely to report that their hand was 'no longer there' after CVS. Taken together, neither the physical nor the subjective data provide evidence for vestibular enhanced self-location.
身体自我意识依赖于感觉信息的连贯整合。除了视觉和体感信息处理外，前庭的作用也已被提出并得到研究。前庭信息似乎对自我定位尤为重要，但仍难以研究。
这项随机对照实验使用了MIRAGE多感官错觉箱，以引发一只手在视觉编码位置和本体感觉编码位置之间的冲突。随着时间的推移，由于本体感觉输入的权重逐渐比视觉输入更重，手的感知位置会缓慢移动。我们假设左侧冷热水前庭刺激（CVS）会增强手部定位的这种移动。
24名健康参与者的结果不支持我们的假设：CVS对手部感知位置从视觉编码位置向本体感觉编码位置移动的估计没有影响。参与者在接受CVS后更有可能报告他们的手“不在那里了”。综合来看，无论是物理数据还是主观数据都没有为前庭增强自我定位提供证据。
