Robotic hand illusion with tactile feedback: Unravelling the relative contribution of visuotactile and visuomotor input to the representation of body parts in space

• Published in: PloS one 2019-01, Vol.14 (1), p.e0210058-e0210058
• Main Authors: Huynh, The Vu, Bekrater-Bodmann, Robin, Fröhner, Jakob, Vogt, Joachim, Beckerle, Philipp
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Artificial Limbs; Asynchronous transfer mode; Biology and Life Sciences; Biomedical engineering; Body Image; Body parts; Calibration; Computer engineering; Data processing; Decision theory; Drift; End effectors; Engineering and Technology; Feedback; Female; Grasping (robotics); Hand; Hand - physiology; Human Body; Human-machine systems; Humans; Illusions - physiology; Male; Medicine and Health Sciences; Motors; Oculomotor integration; Perceptions; Physical Sciences; Pressure sensors; Proprioception; Prostheses; Prosthetics; Representations; Robot arms; Robotics; Robotics - methods; Sensorimotor integration; Sensory feedback; Social Sciences; Spatial calibration; Tactile stimuli; Therapeutic applications; Touch - physiology; Touch Perception - physiology; Virtual reality; Young Adult
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0210058

The rubber hand illusion describes a phenomenon in which participants experience a rubber hand as being part of their body by the synchronous application of visuotactile stimulation to the real and the artificial limb. In the recently introduced robotic hand illusion (RobHI), a robotic hand is incorporated into one's body representation due to the integration of synchronous visuomotor information. However, there are no setups so far that combine visuotactile and visuomotor feedback, which is expected to unravel mechanisms that cannot be detected in experimental designs applying this information in isolation. We developed a robotic hand, controlled by a sensor glove and equipped with pressure sensors, and varied systematically and separately the synchrony for motor feedback (MF) and tactile feedback (TF). In Experiment 1, we implemented a ball-grasping task and assessed the perceived proprioceptive drift of one's own hand as a behavioral measure of the spatial calibration of body coordinates as well as explicit embodiment experiences by a questionnaire. Results revealed significant main effects of both MF and TF for proprioceptive drift data, but we only observed main effects for MF on perceived embodiment. Furthermore, for the proprioceptive drift we found that synchronous feedback in one factor compensates for asynchronous feedback in the other. In Experiment 2, including a new sample of naïve participants, we further explored this finding by adding unimodal conditions, in which we manipulated the presence or absence of MF and/or TF. These findings replicated the results from Experiment 1 and we further found evidence for a supper-additive multisensory effect on spatial body representation caused by the presence of both factors. Results on conscious body perception were less consistent across both experiments. The findings indicate that sensory and motor input equally contribute to the representation of spatial body coordinates which for their part are subject to multisensory enhancing effects. The results outline the potential of human-in-the-loop approaches and might have important implications for clinical applications such as for the future design of robotic prostheses.