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Awareness of voluntary action, rather than body ownership, improves motor control.

ABSTRACT: Awareness of the body is essential for accurate motor control. However, how this awareness influences motor control is poorly understood. The awareness of the body includes awareness of visible body parts as one's own (sense of body ownership) and awareness of voluntary actions over that visible body part (sense of agency). Here, I show that sense of agency over a visible hand improves the initiation of movement, regardless of sense of body ownership. The present study combined the moving rubber hand illusion, which allows experimental manipulation of agency and body ownership, and the finger-tracking paradigm, which allows behavioral quantification of motor control by the ability to coordinate eye with hand movements. This eye-hand coordination requires awareness of the hand to track the hand with the eye. I found that eye-hand coordination is improved when participants experience a sense of agency over a tracked artificial hand, regardless of their sense of body ownership. This improvement was selective for the initiation, but not maintenance, of eye-hand coordination. These results reveal that the prospective experience of explicit sense of agency improves motor control, suggesting that artificial manipulation of prospective agency may be beneficial to rehabilitation and sports training techniques.

SUBMITTER: Matsumiya K

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7801649 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Awareness of voluntary action, rather than body ownership, improves motor control.

Matsumiya Kazumichi K

Scientific reports 20210111 1

Awareness of the body is essential for accurate motor control. However, how this awareness influences motor control is poorly understood. The awareness of the body includes awareness of visible body parts as one's own (sense of body ownership) and awareness of voluntary actions over that visible body part (sense of agency). Here, I show that sense of agency over a visible hand improves the initiation of movement, regardless of sense of body ownership. The present study combined the moving rubber ...[more]

PMID: 33432104

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Project description:Feedback is essential for skill acquisition as it helps identifying and correcting performance errors. Nowadays, Virtual Reality can be used as a tool to guide motor learning, and to provide innovative types of augmented feedback that exceed real world opportunities. Concurrent feedback has shown to be especially beneficial for novices. Moreover, watching skilled performances helps novices to acquire a motor skill, and this effect depends on the perspective taken by the observer. To date, however, the impact of watching one's own performance together with full body superimposition of a skilled performance, either from the front or from the side, remains to be explored. Here we used an immersive, state-of-the-art, low-latency cave automatic virtual environment (CAVE), and we asked novices to perform squat movements in front of a virtual mirror. Participants were assigned to one of three concurrent visual feedback groups: participants either watched their own avatar performing full body movements or were presented with the movement of a skilled individual superimposed on their own performance during movement execution, either from a frontal or from a side view. Motor performance and cognitive representation were measured in order to track changes in movement quality as well as motor memory across time. Consistent with our hypotheses, results showed an advantage of the groups that observed their own avatar performing the squat together with the superimposed skilled performance for some of the investigated parameters, depending on perspective. Specifically, for the deepest point of the squat, participants watching the squat from the front adapted their height, while those watching from the side adapted their backward movement. In a control experiment, we ruled out the possibility that the observed improvements were due to the mere fact of performing the squat movements-irrespective of the type of visual feedback. The present findings indicate that it can be beneficial for novices to watch themselves together with a skilled performance during execution, and that improvement depends on the perspective chosen.

Dataset Information

Awareness of voluntary action, rather than body ownership, improves motor control.

Publications

Awareness of voluntary action, rather than body ownership, improves motor control.

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