Investigation of the sensorimotor mechanisms of respiration and its sense of agency: a virtual reality and physiological study
Details

UNIL restricted access
State: Public
Version: After imprimatur
License: Not specified
Serval ID
serval:BIB_F2A0A86C7C5E
Type
A Master's thesis.
Publication sub-type
Master (thesis) (master)
Collection
Publications
Institution
Title
Investigation of the sensorimotor mechanisms of respiration and its sense of agency: a virtual reality and physiological study
Director(s)
BLANKE O.
Codirector(s)
BETKA S.
Institution details
Université de Lausanne, Faculté de biologie et médecine
Publication state
Accepted
Issued date
2021
Language
english
Number of pages
45
Abstract
This study aimed to explore the sense of agency, self-attribution and motor adaptation in healthy subjects for a non-goal directed task manipulating breathing. To do so, participants were immersed in a virtual reality environment and confronted with an avatar of their body reproducing synchronously or asynchronously their breathing movements’. Based on our results, it can be concluded that as long as the sensory feedback is synchronous, a sense of agency and self-attribution will arise. The dissociation between the sense of agency and motor adaption revealed by our experiment corroborates previous ones with full-body non-goal directed tasks in questioning the comparator model. We propose that for locomotion and breathing tasks, our brain takes into account several signals it receives but especially emphasises the visual cues to decide whether we were the agent of this movement or not. Our results point towards potential therapeutic tools such as the embodiment of a breathing avatar in virtual reality to modulate the sense of agency.
Keywords
sense of agency, breathing, motor adaptation, virtual reality environment
Create date
07/09/2022 15:32
Last modification date
21/09/2023 5:57