At the core of bodily self-consciousness is the perception of the ownership
of one's body. Recent efforts to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms
behind the brain's encoding of the self-body have led to various attempts to
develop a unified theoretical framework to explain related behavioral and
neurophysiological phenomena. A central question to be explained is how body
illusions such as the rubber hand illusion actually occur. Despite the
conceptual descriptions of the mechanisms of bodily self-consciousness and the
possible relevant brain areas, the existing theoretical models still lack an
explanation of the computational mechanisms by which the brain encodes the
perception of one's body and how our subjectively perceived body illusions can
be generated by neural networks. Here we integrate the biological findings of
bodily self-consciousness to propose a Brain-inspired bodily self-perception
model, by which perceptions of bodily self can be autonomously constructed
without any supervision signals. We successfully validated our computational
model with six rubber hand illusion experiments on platforms including a iCub
humanoid robot and simulated environments. The experimental results show that
our model can not only well replicate the behavioral and neural data of monkeys
in biological experiments, but also reasonably explain the causes and results
of the rubber hand illusion from the neuronal level due to advantages in
biological interpretability, thus contributing to the revealing of the
computational and neural mechanisms underlying the occurrence of the rubber
hand illusion.

本研究整合了生物学发现，提出了一个脑启发的身体自我感知模型，通过这个模型可以自主构建身体自我的感觉，实验结果表明我们的模型可以很好地复制人类和猴子在生物实验中的行为和神经数据，并从神经水平上合理地解释引起橡胶手幻觉的原因和结果，从而有助于揭示橡胶手幻觉发生的计算和神经机制。