Improvement of Sense of Agency via Visual Intervention in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Stroke patients may lose their motivation in motor rehabilitation because of the lack of sense of agency over their disabled limb. The present study aims to improve the sense of agency during partially impaired body movement. Specifically, we examined the influence of visual feedback of task performance on the sense of agency in a virtual reality motor task. Healthy participants moved their hand to move a ball in virtual reality to trace a target, while their motion was partially disturbed by a 1-kg weight on the waist. In the intervention condition, the position of the ball was presented at the mid-point between the actual hand position and the tracing target. The results showed that participants’ sense of agency over the ball was greatly improved by the intervention. Our results pointed to a potentially useful method to improve the sense of agency during body movements using modified visual feedback, which may contribute to the development of rehabilitation for stroke patients.