Investigating the Hand Ownership Illusion With Two Views Merged in.

Researchers investigating virtual/augmented reality have shown humans' marked adaptability, especially regarding our sense of body ownership; their cumulative findings have expanded the concept of what it means to have a body. Herein, we report the hand ownership illusion during "two views merged in." In our experiment, participants were presented two first-person perspective views of their arm overlapped, one was the live feed from a camera and the other was a playback video of the same situation, slightly shifted toward one side.

Synchronized Tactile Stimulation on Upper Limbs Using a Wearable Robot for Gait Assistance in Patients With Parkinson's Disease.

This study aimed to investigate whether using a wearable robot applying interactive rhythmic stimulation on the upper limbs of patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) could affect their gait. The wearable robot presented tactile stimuli on the patients' upper limbs, which was mutually synchronized with the swing of their upper limbs. We conducted an evaluation experiment with PD patients ( = 30, Modified Hoehn-Yahr = 1-3, on-state) to investigate the assistance effect by the robot and the immediate after-effect of intervention.

Estimation of stride-by-stride spatial gait parameters using inertial measurement unit attached to the shank with inverted pendulum model.

Inertial measurement unit (IMU)-based gait analysis systems have become popular in clinical environments because of their low cost and quantitative measurement capability. When a shank is selected as the IMU mounting position, an inverted pendulum model (IPM) can accurately estimate its spatial gait parameters. However, the stride-by-stride estimation of gait parameters using one IMU on each shank and the IPMs has not been validated.

Body Movement Synchrony Predicts Degrees of Information Exchange in a Natural Conversation.

Human interaction has two principle functions: building and maintaining relationships with others and exchanging information. The function of building and maintaining relationships with others relates to interpersonal coordination; this behavior pattern is expected to predict the outcome of social relationships, such as between therapists and patients. It is unclear, however, whether the exchange of information is associated with interpersonal coordination.

Effects of Human Synchronous Hand Movements in Eliciting a Sense of Agency and Ownership.

The self is built as an entity independent from the external world using the human ability to experience the senses of agency and ownership. Humans usually experience these senses during movement. Nevertheless, researchers recently reported that another person's synchronous mirror-symmetrical movements elicited both agency and ownership in research participants.

Inertial Measurement Unit-Based Estimation of Foot Trajectory for Clinical Gait Analysis.

Gait analysis is used widely in clinical practice to evaluate abnormal gait caused by disease. Conventionally, medical professionals use motion capture systems or make visual observations to evaluate a patient's gait. Recent biomedical engineering studies have proposed easy-to-use gait analysis methods employing wearable sensors with inertial measurement units (IMUs).

Affective Stimuli for an Auditory P300 Brain-Computer Interface.

Gaze-independent brain computer interfaces (BCIs) are a potential communication tool for persons with paralysis. This study applies affective auditory stimuli to investigate their effects using a P300 BCI. Fifteen able-bodied participants operated the P300 BCI, with positive and negative affective sounds (PA: a meowing cat sound, NA: a screaming cat sound).

The Rubber Tail Illusion as Evidence of Body Ownership in Mice.

Unlabelled: The ownership of one's body parts represents a fundamental aspect of self-consciousness. Accumulating empirical evidence supports the existence of this concept in humans and nonhuman primates, but it is unclear whether nonprimate mammals experience similar feelings. Therefore, the present study used rubber tails to investigate body ownership in rodents.

An Evaluation of Training with an Auditory P300 Brain-Computer Interface for the Japanese Hiragana Syllabary.

Gaze-independent brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are a possible communication channel for persons with paralysis. We investigated if it is possible to use auditory stimuli to create a BCI for the Japanese Hiragana syllabary, which has 46 Hiragana characters. Additionally, we investigated if training has an effect on accuracy despite the high amount of different stimuli involved.

Voluntary movement affects simultaneous perception of auditory and tactile stimuli presented to a non-moving body part.

The simultaneous perception of multimodal sensory information has a crucial role for effective reactions to the external environment. Voluntary movements are known to occasionally affect simultaneous perception of auditory and tactile stimuli presented to the moving body part. However, little is known about spatial limits on the effect of voluntary movements on simultaneous perception, especially when tactile stimuli are presented to a non-moving body part.

Arm crossing updates brain functional connectivity of the left posterior parietal cortex.

The unusual configuration of body parts can cause illusions. For example, when tactile stimuli are delivered to crossed arms a reversal of subjective temporal ordering occurs. Our group has previously demonstrated that arm crossing without sensory stimuli causes activity changes in the left posterior parietal cortex (PPC) and an assessment of tactile temporal order judgments (TOJs) revealed a positive association between activity in this area, especially the left intraparietal sulcus (IPS), and the degree of the crossed-hand illusion.

Dynamic scalp topography reveals neural signs just before performance errors.

Performance errors may cause serious consequences. It has been reported that ongoing activity of the frontal control regions across trials associates with the occurrence of performance errors. However, neural mechanisms that cause performance errors remain largely unknown.

Coherent Activity in Bilateral Parieto-Occipital Cortices during P300-BCI Operation.

The visual P300 brain-computer interface (BCI), a popular system for electroencephalography (EEG)-based BCI, uses the P300 event-related potential to select an icon arranged in a flicker matrix. In earlier studies, we used green/blue (GB) luminance and chromatic changes in the P300-BCI system and reported that this luminance and chromatic flicker matrix was associated with better performance and greater subject comfort compared with the conventional white/gray (WG) luminance flicker matrix. To highlight areas involved in improved P300-BCI performance, we used simultaneous EEG-fMRI recordings and showed enhanced activities in bilateral and right lateralized parieto-occipital areas.

Implementation of a beam forming technique in real-time magnetoencephalography.

Real-time magnetoencephalography (rtMEG) is an emerging neurofeedback technology that could potentially benefit multiple areas of basic and clinical neuroscience. In the present study, we implemented voxel-based real-time coherence measurements in a rtMEG system in which we employed a beamformer to localize signal sources in the anatomical space prior to computing imaginary coherence. Our rtMEG experiment showed that a healthy subject could increase coherence between the parietal cortex and visual cortex when attending to a flickering visual stimulus.

Spatio-temporal updating in the left posterior parietal cortex.

Adopting an unusual posture can sometimes give rise to paradoxical experiences. For example, the subjective ordering of successive unseen tactile stimuli delivered to the two arms can be affected when people cross them. A growing body of evidence now highlights the role played by the parietal cortex in spatio-temporal information processing when sensory stimuli are delivered to the body or when actions are executed; however, little is known about the neural basis of such paradoxical feelings resulting from such unusual limb positions.