Multisensory mechanisms of body ownership and self-location

Having an accurate sense of the spatial boundaries of the body is a prerequisite for interacting with the environment and is thus essential for the survival of any organism with a central nervous system. Every second, our brain receives a staggering amount of information from the body across different sensory channels, each of which features a certain degree of noise. Despite the complexity of the incoming multisensory signals, the brain manages to construct and maintain a stable representation of our own body and its spatial relationships to the external environment. This natural “in-body” experience is such a fundamental subjective feeling that most of us take it for granted. However, patients with lesions in particular brain areas can experience profound disturbances in their normal sense of ownership over their body (somatoparaphrenia) or lose the feeling of being located inside their physical body (out-of-body experiences), suggesting that our “in-body” experience depends on intact neural circuitry in the temporal, frontal, and parietal brain regions. The question at the heart of this thesis relates to how the brain combines visual, tactile, and proprioceptive signals to build an internal representation of the bodily self in space. Over the past two decades, perceptual body illusions have become an important tool for studying the mechanisms underlying our sense of body ownership and self-location. The most influential of these illusions is the rubber hand illusion, in which ownership of an artificial limb is induced via the synchronous stroking of a rubber hand and an individual’s hidden real hand. Studies of this illusion have shown that multisensory integration within the peripersonal space is a key mechanism for bodily self-attribution. In Study I, we showed that the default sense of ownership of one’s real hand, not just the sense of rubber hand ownership, also depends on spatial and temporal multisensory congruence principles implemented in fronto-parietal brain regions. In Studies II and III, we characterized two novel perceptual illusions that provide strong support for the notion that multisensory integration within the peripersonal space is intimately related to the sense of limb ownership, and we examine the role of vision in this process. In Study IV, we investigated a fullbody version of the rubber hand illusion—the “out-of-body illusion”—and show that it can be used to induce predictable changes in one’s sense of self-location and body ownership. Finally, in Study V, we used the out-of-body illusion to “perceptually teleport” participants during brain imaging and identify activity patterns specific to the sense of self-location in a given position in space. Together, these findings shed light on the role of multisensory integration in building the experience of the bodily self in space and provide initial evidence for how representations of body ownership and self-location interact in the brain

Media Presence and Inner Presence: The Sense of Presence in Virtual Reality Technologies

Abstract. Presence is widely accepted as the key concept to be considered in any research involving human interaction with Virtual Reality (VR). Since its original description, the concept of presence has developed over the past decade to be considered by many researchers as the essence of any experience in a virtual environment. The VR generating systems comprise two main parts: a technological component and a psychological experience. The different relevance given to them produced two different but coexisting visions of presence: the rationalist and the psychological/ecological points of view. The rationalist point of view considers a VR system as a collection of specific machines with the necessity of the inclusion \ud of the concept of presence. The researchers agreeing with this approach describe the sense of presence as a function of the experience of a given medium (Media Presence). The main result of this approach is the definition of presence as the perceptual illusion of non-mediation produced by means of the disappearance of the medium from the conscious attention of the subject. At the other extreme, there \ud is the psychological or ecological perspective (Inner Presence). Specifically, this perspective considers presence as a neuropsychological phenomenon, evolved from the interplay of our biological and cultural inheritance, whose goal is the control of the human activity. \ud Given its key role and the rate at which new approaches to understanding and examining presence are appearing, this chapter draws together current research on presence to provide an up to date overview of the most widely accepted approaches to its understanding and measurement

Developmental Robots - A New Paradigm

It has been proved to be extremely challenging for humans to program a robot to such a sufficient degree that it acts properly in a typical unknown human environment. This is especially true for a humanoid robot due to the very large number of redundant degrees of freedom and a large number of sensors that are required for a humanoid to work safely and effectively in the human environment. How can we address this fundamental problem? Motivated by human mental development from infancy to adulthood, we present a theory, an architecture, and some experimental results showing how to enable a robot to develop its mind automatically, through online, real time interactions with its environment. Humans mentally “raise” the robot through “robot sitting” and “robot schools” instead of task-specific robot programming

Workflow tools for biological applications

When identifying best practices for multistep processes involving data analysis, it is fre- quently the case that the data scientist is asked to wear many hats simultaneouly: developer, programmer, statistician, graphic designer, writer, administrator. Although many scientists address these roles with great success, it is often at the expense of reproducibility, scalability, and organizational knowledge. The process of formalizing each step of the process creates op- portunity to apply lessons learned and proven tools from multiple disciplines to optimize each step of the transformation from raw data to usable output. This modular approach allows organizations to mix off the shelf technical solutions with custom, swap out components for flexibility and minimize rework. The primary focus of this dissertation is to extend the conceptualization of pipeline to include methods drawn from human computer interaction, exploratory data analysis, interactive graphics, and reproducible research. We describe application to three distinct user groups: (1) a general audience of readers (2) biologists involved in metabolomics analysis (3) analysts working in a public sector regulatory environment. The resulting technical tools are implemented in the R packages ggparallel, chromatoplotsGUI, dataFormats, and CVBreports. Our analysis shows that these tools facilitate a positive transformative effect on the quality of communication between stakeholders. Specifically we see that the common angles plot pre- sented in ggparallel reduces the lie factor, chromatoplotsGUI enables display of metabolomic data rapidly and with a level of detail that facilitates development of the underlying analysis en- gine and the methods of dataFormats and CVBreports enable significantly reduced turnaround times for preliminary data assesment

Behavioral, Neural, and Computational Principles of Bodily Self-Consciousness

Recent work in human cognitive neuroscience has linked self-consciousness to the processing of multisensory bodily signals (bodily self-consciousness [BSC]) in fronto-parietal cortex and more posterior temporo-parietal regions. We highlight the behavioral, neurophysiological, neuroimaging, and computational laws that subtend BSC in humans and non-human primates. We propose that BSC includes body-centered perception (hand, face, and trunk), based on the integration of proprioceptive, vestibular, and visual bodily inputs, and involves spatio-temporal mechanisms integrating multisensory bodily stimuli within peripersonal space (PPS). We develop four major constraints of BSC (proprioception, body-related visual information, PPS, and embodiment) and argue that the fronto-parietal and temporo-parietal processing of trunk-centered multisensory signals in PPS is of particular relevance for theoretical models and simulations of BSC and eventually of self-consciousness

Sonic interactions in virtual environments

This book tackles the design of 3D spatial interactions in an audio-centered and audio-first perspective, providing the fundamental notions related to the creation and evaluation of immersive sonic experiences. The key elements that enhance the sensation of place in a virtual environment (VE) are: Immersive audio: the computational aspects of the acoustical-space properties of Virutal Reality (VR) technologies Sonic interaction: the human-computer interplay through auditory feedback in VE VR systems: naturally support multimodal integration, impacting different application domains Sonic Interactions in Virtual Environments will feature state-of-the-art research on real-time auralization, sonic interaction design in VR, quality of the experience in multimodal scenarios, and applications. Contributors and editors include interdisciplinary experts from the fields of computer science, engineering, acoustics, psychology, design, humanities, and beyond. Their mission is to shape an emerging new field of study at the intersection of sonic interaction design and immersive media, embracing an archipelago of existing research spread in different audio communities and to increase among the VR communities, researchers, and practitioners, the awareness of the importance of sonic elements when designing immersive environments