Embodying an artificial hand increases blood flow to the investigated limb.

The autonomic nervous system is the main determinant of the blood flow directed towards a body part, and it is tightly connected to the representation of the body in the brain; would the experimental modulation of the sense of ownership of the limb affect its blood perfusion? In healthy participants, we employed the rubber hand illusion paradigm to modulate limb ownership while we monitored the brachial artery blood flow and resistance of the investigated limb. In all conditions with brush-stroking, we found an initial drop in the blood flow due to tactile stimulation. Subsequently, in the illusion condition where both the rubber and real hand experience synchronous brush-stroking, the blood flow rose significantly faster and reached significantly higher values.

Behavioral and Physiological Evidence of a favored Hand Posture in the Body Representation for Action.

Motor planning and execution require a representational map of our body. Since the body can assume different postures, it is not known how it is represented in this map. Moreover, is the generation of the motor command favored by some body configurations? We investigated the existence of a centrally favored posture of the hand for action, in search of physiological and behavioral advantages due to central motor processing.

Multisensory Integration Is Modulated by Hypnotizability.

This study investigated multisensory integration in 29 medium-to-high (mid-highs) and 24 low-to-medium (mid-lows) hypnotizable individuals, classified according to the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, Form A. Participants completed a simultaneity judgment (SJ) task, where an auditory and a visual stimulus were presented in close proximity to their body in a range of 11 stimulus onset asynchronies. Results show that mid-highs were prone to judge audiovisual stimuli as simultaneous over a wider range of time intervals between sensory stimuli, as expressed by a broader temporal binding window, when the visual stimulus precedes the auditory one.

Development and Validation of a Novel Calibration Methodology and Control Approach for Robot-Aided Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS).

Objective: This article presents the development and validation of a new robotic system for Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), characterized by a new control approach, and an ad-hoc calibration methodology, specifically devised for the TMS application.

Methods: The robotic TMS platform is composed of a 7 dof manipulator, controlled by an impedance control, and a camera-based neuronavigation system. The proposed calibration method was optimized on the workspace useful for the specific TMS application (spherical shell around the subject's head), and tested on three different hand-eye and robot-world calibration algorithms.