The Effect of Predictability of Visual Motion from Motor Commands on the Recognition Process of Self-Attribution

Abstract

The recognition process of self-attribution, which is mainly caused by congruence between visual and proprioceptive information and between visual information and prediction from motor commands, has been extensively studied. However, it is still unclear as to which congruence plays the primary role in the process during the voluntary movements. We conducted a user study that distinguishes proprioceptive information and prediction from motor commands by displaying the modified images of the participants' hands in various rotation angles; this introduced the conflict between visual and proprioceptive information. The hand motions of the participants were restricted so that they could predict the visual motion of the images of their hands by the motor command even while the images were rotated. The result indicates that motion prediction plays a primary role in the recognition process of self-attribution, and this predictability depends on the motion pattern and appearance of the hand images.