Thesis Project Form

The sense of body ownership can be plastic. Several studies investigated ownership towards substitute artificial limbs, which are controlled by the movements of a real limb and/or limbs from which non-visual sensory feedback is provided on an existing limb.

The thesis specifically aims at studying the embodiment of a sixth finger. Experiments will be designed to assess changes in self-location (proprioceptive drift) by investigating the role of action (free self-touching vs. free environment touching) in driving a recalibration of the felt position of the hand plus the sixth finger. Experiments will consist of three phases:

1/ Self location baseline. Self-perception of the augmented hand (sixth finger) is assessed through proprioceptive judgement tasks after reaching movements.
2/ Training. Participants are divided in two groups: a test group (T) is trained through free self-touching, whereas a control group (C) is trained through free environment exploration.
3/ Self location after adaptation. The proprioception of position test is repeated to calculate the proprioceptive drift.

Questionnaires will be used to find relations between objective and subjective measures.

Design and fast prototyping of a simple active device to enable a sixth finger.
Conduction of psychophysical experiments.
Data analysis in MATLAB/R and interpretation of results.