Yutaka Oouchida

The sense of body ownership, the feeling that one's body belongs to oneself, is a crucial subjective conscious experience of one's body. Recent methodological advances regarding crossmodal illusions have provided novel insights into how multisensory interactions shape human perception and cognition, underpinning conscious experience, particularly alteration of body ownership. Moreover, in post-stroke rehabilitation, encouraging the use of the paretic limb in daily life is considered vital, as a settled sense of ownership and attentional engagement toward the paralyzed body part may promote increased frequency of its use and prevent learned nonuse. Therefore, in addition to traditional methods, novel interventions using neurorehabilitation techniques that induce self-body recognition are needed. This study investigated whether the illusory experience of a patient's ownership alterations of their paretic hand facilitates the enhancement in the range of motion of succeeding imitation movements. An experiment combining a modified version of the rubber hand illusion with imitation training was conducted with chronic hemiplegia. A larger imitation movement of the paretic hand was observed in the illusion-induced condition, indicating that the feeling of ownership toward the observed limb promotes the induction of intrinsic potential for motor performance. This training, using subjective experience, may help develop new post-stroke rehabilitation interventions.

Patients with lower limb amputation experience "embodiment" while using a prosthesis, perceiving it as part of their body. Humans control their biological body parts and receive appropriate information by directing attention toward them, which is called body-specific attention. This study investigated whether patients with lower limb amputation similarly direct attention to prosthetic limbs. The participants were 11 patients with lower limb amputation who started training to walk with a prosthesis. Attention to the prosthetic foot was measured longitudinally by a visual detection task. In the initial stage of walking rehabilitation, the index of attention to the prosthetic foot was lower than that to the healthy foot. In the final stage, however, there was no significant difference between the two indexes of attention. Correlation analysis revealed that the longer the duration of prosthetic foot use, the greater the attention directed toward it. These findings indicate that using a prosthesis focuses attention akin to that of an individual's biological limb. Moreover, they expressed that the prosthesis felt like a part of their body when they could walk independently. These findings suggest that the use of prostheses causes integration of visual information and movement about the prosthesis, resulting in its subjective embodiment.