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The predictive brain in action: Involuntary actions reduce body prediction errors

View ORCID ProfilePablo Lanillos, Sae Franklin, David W. Franklin
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.08.191304
Pablo Lanillos
1Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour. Artificial intelligence department, Radboud University, the Netherlands
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  • For correspondence: p.lanillos@donders.ru.nl
Sae Franklin
2Institute for Cognitive Systems, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany
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David W. Franklin
3Neuromuscular Diagnostics, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany
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Abstract

The perception of our body in space is flexible and manipulable. The predictive brain hypothesis explains this malleability as a consequence of the interplay between incoming sensory information and our body expectations. However, given the interaction between perception and action, we might also expect that actions would arise due to prediction errors, especially in conflicting situations. Here we describe a computational model, based on the free-energy principle, that forecasts involuntary movements in sensorimotor conflicts. We experimentally confirm those predictions in humans by means of a virtual reality rubber-hand illusion. Participants generated movements (forces) towards the virtual hand, regardless of its location with respect to the real arm, with little to no forces produced when the virtual hand overlaid their physical hand. The congruency of our model predictions and human observations shows that the brain-body is generating actions to reduce the prediction error between the expected arm location and the new visual arm. This observed unconscious mechanism is an empirical validation of the perception-action duality in body adaptation to uncertain situations and evidence of the active component of predictive processing.

Author Summary Humans’ capacity to perceive and control their body in space is central in awareness, adaptation and safe interaction. From low-level body perception to body-ownership, discovering how the brain represents the body and generates actions is of major importance for cognitive science and also for robotics and artificial intelligence. The present study shows that humans move their body to match the expected location according to other (visual) sensory input, which corresponds to reducing the prediction error. This means that the brain adapts to conflicting or uncertain information from the senses by unconsciously acting in the world.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • + Improved details about the experimental protocol and + Improved the discussion taking into account the control condition results. + Typos and error in figures references.

  • 1 The body midline effect describes an increased misslocalization of the hand in the RHI towards the center of the body. In the case of movements, we need to consider the impact of the body posture in the forces exerted in the arm.

  • 2 The notation reflects the order of the dynamics. μ[0], μ[1], μ[2] represents the position, velocity and acceleration of the inferred brain variables71, 72.

  • 3 In the case of having a task we shall include a perceptual attractor in the sensory manifold and its transformation to the joint variables. For instance we can include the virtual arm as the goal by substituting in equation (3) the second row by (T(μ[0])A(μ[0],ρ) − kμ[0])/m, where is A(μ[0],ρ) = β(ρ − gν(μ[0])) and the T(μ[0]) = L sin(μ[0] − π/2)

  • 4 A pretest with the vibrator was performed on the participant hand who gave a written statement that the vibrator did not harm himself.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.
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Posted October 07, 2020.
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The predictive brain in action: Involuntary actions reduce body prediction errors
Pablo Lanillos, Sae Franklin, David W. Franklin
bioRxiv 2020.07.08.191304; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.08.191304
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The predictive brain in action: Involuntary actions reduce body prediction errors
Pablo Lanillos, Sae Franklin, David W. Franklin
bioRxiv 2020.07.08.191304; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.08.191304

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