Mismatch negativity for visuo-tactile inconsistency in rubber hand illusion paradigm

Abstract

The human body schema has innate characteristics, it is known to change through the process of growth and injury, thus making it mutable. And there have been many attempts to augment or enhance limbs as perceptual abilities and effectors in body function augmentation technology. However, the methodology that allows for a stronger sense of ownership for augmented body parts was unclear. Therefore, we considered that, in the rubber hand illusion (RHI) paradigm, neurofeedback could enhance the sense of ownership in the process of adapting to the consistency or inconsistency between visual and tactile stimuli. And we focused our attention on neurofeedback learning by mismatch negativity (MMN). MMN-based learning has been shown to be effective for subconscious learning. In this paper, we consider RHI as conscious adaptive learning, and consider that it can be approached by MMN in the same way. However, in order to use MMNs for RHI, it is necessary to detect the respons as EEG measurements for multimodal inconsistency as the secondary clue rather than the inconsistency of sensory stimulus prediction as primary clue. In this paper, we evaluate the MMN for the visual-tactile stimuli of the extra body in which the sense of ownership occurs in the RHI paradigm. It detects MMNs that are only caused by discrepancies between the senses. And we detect MMN that are only caused by inconsistency between multimodal.