Abstract
Representing objects in space is difficult because sensorimotor events are anchored in different reference frames, which can be either eye-, arm-, or target-centered. In the brain, Gain-Field (GF) neurons in the parietal cortex are involved in computing the necessary spatial transformations for aligning the tactile, visual and proprioceptive signals. In reaching tasks, these GF neurons exploit a mechanism based on multiplicative interaction for binding simultaneously touched events from the hand with visual and proprioception information.By doing so, they can infer new reference frames to represent dynamically the location of the body parts in the visual space (i.e., the body schema) and nearby targets (i.e., its peripersonal space). In this line, we propose a neural model based on GF neurons for integrating tactile events with arm postures and visual locations for constructing hand- and target-centered receptive fields in the visual space. In robotic experiments using an artificial skin, we show how our neural architecture reproduces the behaviors of parietal neurons (1) for encoding dynamically the body schema of our robotic arm without any visual tags on it and (2) for estimating the relative orientation and distance of targets to it. We demonstrate how tactile information facilitates the integration of visual and proprioceptive signals in order to construct the body space.
Highlights
The body schema is the perception that each individual has of his own body in space
We propose a neural architecture of body and peripersonal space representation that relies on the integration of multiple feedbacks from the robot body; i.e., its proprioception, its tactile input and its vision
We present the results of three experiments using the proposed model of tactile, visual and proprioceptive integration to represent the body schema and the peripersonal space
Summary
The body schema is the perception that each individual has of his own body in space. The acquisition of this body schema during infancy helps to learn a structural organization of the body parts and their visual shape, to establish the boundaries of the body and to situate better its physical limits (Gliga and Dehaene-Lambertz, 2005; Klaes et al, 2015; Marshall and Meltzoff, 2015; Bhatt et al, 2016; Jubran et al, 2018). The body schema grows to enhance spatial awareness to objects (reaching and grasping) (Van der Meer, 1997; Corbetta et al, 2000) and to others (self-other differentiation, eye-gaze; Deák et al, 2014). In order to guide the movement of the body in space and to allow interaction with an immediate environment, the brain must constantly monitor the location of each body part at different postures and to analyze the spatial relationship between body parts and neighboring objects.This process requires the integration of proprioceptive, tactile, visual, and even auditory information to align the different reference frames from each other; for instance, eye-, hand-, torso-, or head-centered reference frames. Endowing to robots a body schema could help in reaching and grasping tasks or in developing a sense of spatial awareness in order to interact physically and socially with persons
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