Neuroscience robotics for controlled induction and real-time assessment of hallucinations
Neuroscience robotics for controlled induction and real-time assessment of hallucinations
复制标题
DOI：
10.1038/s41596-022-00737-z
复制
发表时间：
2022-09-12
期刊：
影响因子：
14.8
通讯作者：
Blanke, Olaf
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bernasconi, Fosco;Blondiaux, Eva;Blanke, Olaf
虽然幻觉是主要精神和神经疾病的重要和常见症状，但对其大脑机制知之甚少。幻觉是不可预测的私人经历，使其调查，量化和评估极具挑战性。幻觉研究的一个主要缺点是缺乏能够诱导特异性和短暂的幻觉的方法，这些幻觉类似于临床幻觉，可以反复引发，并且在实验条件下各不相同。通过将临床观察和认知神经科学与机器人技术的最新进展相结合，我们设计了一种新的设备和感觉运动方法，能够反复诱导一种特定的、临床相关的幻觉：在场幻觉。存在幻觉是通过施加特定的冲突（时空）感觉运动刺激，包括上肢和躯干的参与者。另一种与MRI兼容的机器人设备使用类似的感觉运动刺激，可以识别这些幻觉的大脑机制。该方法能够在完全受控的实验条件下实时识别幻觉的行为和额颞神经生物标志物，可应用于健康参与者以及精神分裂症、神经退行性疾病或其他幻觉患者。这些协议的执行需要认知神经科学和MRI处理方面的中级技能，以及控制机器人设备的最低编码经验。这些协议需要近似3小时才能完成。
Although hallucinations are important and frequent symptoms in major psychiatric and neurological diseases, little is known about their brain mechanisms. Hallucinations are unpredictable and private experiences, making their investigation, quantification and assessment highly challenging. A major shortcoming in hallucination research is the absence of methods able to induce specific and short-lasting hallucinations, which resemble clinical hallucinations, can be elicited repeatedly and vary across experimental conditions. By integrating clinical observations and recent advances in cognitive neuroscience with robotics, we have designed a novel device and sensorimotor method able to repeatedly induce a specific, clinically relevant hallucination: presence hallucination. Presence hallucinations are induced by applying specific conflicting (spatiotemporal) sensorimotor stimulation including an upper extremity and the torso of the participant. Another, MRI-compatible, robotic device using similar sensorimotor stimulation permitted the identification of the brain mechanisms of these hallucinations. Enabling the identification of behavioral and a frontotemporal neural biomarkers of hallucinations, under fully controlled experimental conditions and in real-time, this method can be applied in healthy participants as well as patients with schizophrenia, neurodegenerative disease or other hallucinations. The execution of these protocols requires intermediate-level skills in cognitive neuroscience and MRI processing, as well as minimal coding experience to control the robotic device. These protocols take similar to 3 h to be completed.