Grechuta, K. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2019

Challenging the boundaries of the physical self: purely distal cues in the environment impact body ownership

The unique ability to identify ones own body and experience it as ones own is fundamental in goal-oriented behavior and survival. However, the mechanisms underlying the so-called body ownership are yet not fully understood. The plasticity of body ownership has been studied using two experimental methods or their variations. Specifically, the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI), where the tactile stimuli are externally generated, or the moving RHI which implies self-initiated movements. Grounded in these paradigms, evidence has demonstrated that body ownership is a product of bottom-up reception of self- and externally-generated multisensory information and top-down comparison between the predicted and the actual sensory stimuli. Crucially, provided the design of the current paradigms, where one of the manipulated cues always involves the processing of a proximal modality sensing the body or its surface (e.g., touch), the contribution of sensory signals which pertain to the environment remain elusive. Here we propose that, as any robust percept, body ownership depends on the integration and prediction of all the sensory stimuli, and therefore it will depend on the consistency of purely distal sensory signals pertaining to the environment. To test our hypothesis, we create an embodied goal-oriented task and manipulate the predictability of the surrounding environment by changing the congruency of purely distal multisensory cues while preserving bodily and action-driven signals entirely predictable. Our results empirically reveal that the way we represent our body is contingent upon all the sensory stimuli including purely distal and action-independent signals which pertain to the environment.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

Self beyond the body: task-relevant distal cues modulate performance and body ownership

The understanding of Body Ownership (BO) largely relies on the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) where synchronous stroking of real and Rubber Hands (RH) leads to an illusion of ownership of RH provided physical, anatomical, postural and spatial plausibility of the two body-parts. RHI also occurs during visuomotor synchrony, in particular, when the visual feedback of virtual arm movements follows the trajectory of the instantiated motor command. Hence BO seems to result from a bottom-up integration of afferent and efferent proximal multisensory evidence, and top-down prediction of both externally and self-generated signals, which occurs when the predictions about upcoming sensory signals are accurate. In motor control, the differential processing of predicted and actual sensory consequences of self-generated actions is addressed by, the so-called, Forward Model (FM). Based on an efference copy or corollary discharge, FM issues predictions about the sensory consequences of motor commands and compares them with the actual outcome. The discrepancies (Sensory Prediction Errors, SPEs) are used to correct the action on the consecutive trial and provide new estimates of the current state of the body and the environment. Here, we propose that BO might be computed by FMs, and therefore, it might depend on their consistency, specifically, in contexts where the sensory feedback is self-generated. Crucially, to reduce SPE, FMs integrate both proximal (proprioceptive) and distal (vision, audition) sensory cues relevant to the task. Thus, if BO depends on the consistency of FMs, it would be compromised by the incongruency of not only proximal but also distal cues. To test our hypothesis, we devised an embodied VR-based task where action outcomes were signaled by distinct auditory cues. By manipulating the cues with respect to their spatiotemporal congruency and valence, we show that distal feedback which violates predictions about action outcomes compromises both BO and performance. These results demonstrate that BO is influenced by not only efferent and afferent cues which pertain to the body itself but also those arising outside of the body and suggest that in goal-oriented tasks BO might result from a computation of FM.

neuroscience↗