Thought consciousness and source monitoring depend on robotically controlled sensorimotor conflicts and illusory states

Autor: Andrea Serino, Polona Pozeg, Fosco Bernasconi, Marco Solcà, Masayuki Hara, Pierre Progin, Giedre Stripeikyte, Herberto Dhanis, Roy Salomon, Hannes Bleuler, Giulio Rognini, Olaf Blanke
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Zdroj: iScience, Vol 24, Iss 1, Pp 101955- (2021)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2589-0042
DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2020.101955
Popis: Summary: Thought insertion (TI) is characterized by the experience that certain thoughts, occurring in one's mind, are not one's own, but the thoughts of somebody else and suggestive of a psychotic disorder. We report a robotics-based method able to investigate the behavioral and subjective mechanisms of TI in healthy participants. We used a robotic device to alter body perception by providing online sensorimotor stimulation, while participants performed cognitive tasks implying source monitoring of mental states attributed to either oneself or another person. Across several experiments, conflicting sensorimotor stimulation reduced the distinction between self- and other-generated thoughts and was, moreover, associated with the experimentally generated feeling of being in the presence of an alien agent and subjective aspects of TI. Introducing a new robotics-based approach that enables the experimental study of the brain mechanisms of TI, these results link TI to predictable self-other shifts in source monitoring and specific sensorimotor processes.
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