Abstract
Multisensory integration is a key factor in establishing bodily self-consciousness and in adapting humans to novel environments. The rubber hand illusion paradigm, in which humans can immediately perceive illusory ownership to an artificial hand, is a traditional technique for investigating multisensory integration and the feeling of illusory ownership. However, the long-term learning properties of the rubber hand illusion have not been previously investigated. Moreover, although sleep contributes to various aspects of cognition, including learning and memory, its influence on illusory learning of the artificial hand has not yet been assessed. We determined the effects of daily repetitive training and sleep on learning visuo-tactile-proprioceptive sensory integration and illusory ownership in healthy adult participants by using the traditional rubber hand illusion paradigm. Subjective ownership of the rubber hand, proprioceptive drift, and galvanic skin response were measured to assess learning indexes. Subjective ownership was maintained and proprioceptive drift increased with daily training. Proprioceptive drift, but not subjective ownership, was significantly attenuated after sleep. A significantly greater reduction in galvanic skin response was observed after wakefulness compared to after sleep. Our results suggest that although repetitive rubber hand illusion training facilitates multisensory integration and physiological habituation of a multisensory incongruent environment, sleep corrects illusional integration and habituation based on experiences in a multisensory incongruent environment. These findings may increase our understanding of adaptive neural processes to novel environments, specifically, bodily self-consciousness and sleep-dependent neuroplasticity.
Highlights
Mental representations of body orientation and configuration are a fundamental aspect of self-consciousness [1] and depend on afferent and efferent information about ongoing sensorimotor processes [2]
We examined the effect of daily repetitive training and post-training sleep on artificial limb ownership learning by means of the rubber hand illusion (RHI) paradigm [11,21,22] on the basis of proprioceptive drift (PD) [11] and changes in physiological arousal [23] that contribute to the development of the feeling of artificial limb ownership [24,25]
Accumulated training effects on artificial limb ownership individual RHI training sessions immediately resulted in greater illusory ownership and greater visuo-tactile-proprioceptive integration in line with previous reports [11,21,31], daily repetitive RHI training maintained illusory ownership, but potentially guided toward continuous improvement in visuotactile-proprioceptive integration
Summary
Mental representations of body orientation and configuration are a fundamental aspect of self-consciousness [1] and depend on afferent and efferent information about ongoing sensorimotor processes [2]. The feeling of limb ownership is evoked by the multisensory integration of vision, touch, and proprioception, and has been postulated to be acquired a posteriori: young infants show consistent proprioceptive-visual invariants [1,10], and adults can acquire the feeling of ownership of an artificial limb by repetitive multisensory learning [11] Under this integration process, vision dominates over touch and proprioception [12,13]; artificially displaced images of a limb simultaneously provided with illusory sensations of touch and proprioception elicit the feeling of limb ownership [11] via adaptively configured vision-touch and vision-proprioception integrations. The long-term regulation of illusory limb ownership consolidation has not been elucidated
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