Abstract
Body ownership illusions provide evidence that our sense of self is not coherent and can be extended to non-body objects. Studying about these illusions gives us practical tools to understand the brain mechanisms that underlie body recognition and the experience of self. We previously introduced an illusion of body ownership transfer (BOT) for operators of a very humanlike robot. This sensation of owning the robot’s body was confirmed when operators controlled the robot either by performing the desired motion with their body (motion-control) or by employing a brain-computer interface (BCI) that translated motor imagery commands to robot movement (BCI-control). The interesting observation during BCI-control was that the illusion could be induced even with a noticeable delay in the BCI system. Temporal discrepancy has always shown critical weakening effects on body ownership illusions. However the delay-robustness of BOT during BCI-control raised a question about the interaction between the proprioceptive inputs and delayed visual feedback in agency-driven illusions. In this work, we compared the intensity of BOT illusion for operators in two conditions; motion-control and BCI-control. Our results revealed a significantly stronger BOT illusion for the case of BCI-control. This finding highlights BCI’s potential in inducing stronger agency-driven illusions by building a direct communication between the brain and controlled body, and therefore removing awareness from the subject’s own body.
Highlights
Philosophers quested to find the relationship between the body and the experience of self
Since the subject’s performance significantly influences the intensity of illusion they experience[33], their brain-computer interface (BCI) performance was positively biased in both training sessions and control sessions for all subjects in order to remove the negative effect of classifier mis-performance in failed trials
From the above results we can conclude that employment of a BCI-teleoperational interface for the control of a humanlike robot’s body could induce a stronger illusion of body ownership transfer in the operators than the conventional motion-capture interface in which operators were required to perform bodily motions
Summary
Philosophers quested to find the relationship between the body and the experience of self. Our understanding of the mechanism through which the human mind recognizes a certain body as the self remained limited until recently, when Botvinick and Cohen introduced the rubber hand illusion (RHI)[1] They showed that touches on a rubber hand placed in front of a subject along with the simultaneous touches on the subject’s hidden hand could produce a feeling of ownership and displacement toward the seen fake hand as if the rubber hand became a part of the subject’s own body. When in a new set of experiments, we implemented a brain-computer interface (BCI) for the operation[24] and the operators could control the robot just by imagining the movement -without moving their own body, we found out that they could experience a significant BOT illusion even with a rather long delay (about 1 second) in the BCI system This difference between the outcomes of the two experimental setups (motion-control and BCI-control) left an unanswered question about the effect of the temporal delay on the agency-driven illusions. One can say that the difference between the BOT illusions in the two experimental conditions emerged from the contribution of the afferent proprioceptive feedback and the mechanism it interacted with the delayed visual feedback
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