Abstract
SummaryWhen people talk, they move their hands to enhance meaning. Using accelerometry, we measured whether people spontaneously use their artificial limbs (prostheses) to gesture, and whether this behavior relates to everyday prosthesis use and perceived embodiment. Perhaps surprisingly, one- and two-handed participants did not differ in the number of gestures they produced in gesture-facilitating tasks. However, they did differ in their gesture profile. One-handers performed more, and bigger, gesture movements with their intact hand relative to their prosthesis. Importantly, one-handers who gestured more similarly to their two-handed counterparts also used their prosthesis more in everyday life. Although collectively one-handers only marginally agreed that their prosthesis feels like a body part, one-handers who reported they embody their prosthesis also showed greater prosthesis use for communication and daily function. Our findings provide the first empirical link between everyday prosthesis use habits and perceived embodiment and a novel means for implicitly indexing embodiment.
Highlights
The notion of embodiment—which we can relate to an external and foreign object as if it was a part of our body—is increasingly capturing the interest of researchers across multiple fields
We measured whether people spontaneously use their artificial limbs to gesture, and whether this behavior relates to everyday prosthesis use and perceived embodiment
One- and two-handed participants did not differ in the number of gestures they produced in gesture-facilitating tasks
Summary
The notion of embodiment—which we can relate to an external and foreign object as if it was a part of our body—is increasingly capturing the interest of researchers across multiple fields. Psychologists and philosophers attempt to define and characterize embodiment (de Vignemont, 2018, 2011; Ehrsson, 2020; Longo et al, 2008; Miller et al, 2018), cognitive neuroscientists are searching for its neural fingerprint (Collins et al, 2017; MaimonMor and Makin, 2020; Van Den Heiligenberg et al, 2018), and biomedical and robotics engineers are interested in harnessing embodiment as a tool to measure technology adoption and successful rehabilitation (Bensmaia and Miller, 2014; Marasco et al, 2018; Pazzaglia and Molinari, 2016; Valle et al, 2018) Despite this growing interest, the underlying mechanisms of embodiment—sharing neurocognitive resources, originally devoted to controlling one’s body, to represent and operate external objects—are still poorly understood. There is currently a growing need for novel measures of artificial limb embodiment
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