Self in motion: sensorimotor and cognitive mechanisms in gait agency

Abstract

Kannape OA, Blanke O. Self in motion: sensorimotor and cognitive mechanisms in gait agency. J Neurophysiol 110: 1837-1847, 2013. First published July 3, 2013 doi:10.1152/jn.01042.2012.-Acting in our environment and experiencing ourselves as conscious agents are fundamental aspects of human selfhood. While large advances have been made with respect to understanding human sensorimotor control from an engineering approach, knowledge about its interaction with cognition and the conscious experience of movement (agency) is still sparse, especially for locomotion. We investigated these relationships by using life-size visual feedback of participants' ongoing locomotion, thereby extending agency research previously limited to goal-directed upper limb movements to continuous movements of the entire body. By introducing temporal delays and cognitive loading we were able to demonstrate distinct effects of bottom-up visuomotor conflicts as well as top-down cognitive loading on the conscious experience of locomotion (gait agency) and gait movements. While gait agency depended on the spatial and temporal congruency of the avatar feedback, gait movements were solely driven by its temporal characteristics as participants nonconsciously attempted to synchronize their gait with their avatar's gait. Furthermore, gait synchronization was suppressed by cognitive loading across all tested delays, whereas gait agency was only affected for selective temporal delays that depended on the participant's step cycle. Extending data from upper limb agency and auditory gait agency, our results are compatible with effector-independent and supramodal control of agency; they show that both mechanisms are dissociated from automated sensorimotor control and that cognitive loading further enhances this dissociation.

Full body action remapping of peripersonal space: The case of walking

“…However, the body also moves as a whole leading to displacements of the individual in the environment (i.e. Kannape, Schwabe, Tadi, & Blanke, 2010;Kannape & Blanke, 2013). Moreover, phenomenologically, the experience of our body and self in space is not limited to that of single body parts, mostly the hand, but concerns the body as a whole (see e.g.…”

“…1, participants either walked (in the Walking Condition) or stood (in the Standing Condition) on a treadmill (U.N.O. X-Trail 2.0, Beny Sports, Nürnberg, Germany) that was 0.5 m wide and 1.3 m long (as in Kannape & Blanke, 2013). The console and the handlebars of the treadmill were detached in order to permit participants an unimpeded view of a 4.0  2.5 m 2 back-projection screen (width  height, 1280  1024 pixels, 60 Hz) onto which a fixation cross (10  10 cm 2 cross) was displayed at each individual participant's eye-level height and on his or her body midline.…”

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

“…: Jeannerod, 2003;Gallese and Sinigaglia, 2010;Haggard and Chambon, 2012;Marcel, 2003;interoception: Craig, 2002;Damasio, 2003;Seth, 2013). Current research has also started to study global aspects of BSC (selfidentification and self-location) based on interoceptive signals (Aspell et al, 2013;Ronchi et al, 2015) and sensorimotor signals (Kannape et al, 2010;Kannape and Blanke, 2013). However, in the present paper we focus on multisensory brain mechanisms of exteroceptive bodily signals as, we believe, this is the simplest account for BSC (see also Blanke and Metzinger, 2009).…”

Reprint of “Breathing and sense of self: Visuo-respiratory conflicts alter body self-consciousness”

“…However, our subjects described a synchrony-dependent modulation of the feeling that the motor act of breathing was related to the virtual body (Q3 and Q4). Previous work on the sense of agency has revealed that sensorimotor conflicts between motor signals and their sensory feedback (vision, auditory, tactile) are of key relevance for experimental manipulations of agency for movements of hands (Franck et al, 2001;Frith, 2005), or whole bodies (Kannape and Blanke, 2013;Kannape et al, 2010). The ribcage and respiratory muscle somatosensory systems have the general features of the skeletal locomotor system.…”