Enhancing motor imagery in the third-person perspective by manipulating sense of body ownership with virtual reality

Virtual reality (VR)–guided motor imagery (MI) is a widely used approach for motor rehabilitation, especially for patients with severe motor impairments. Most approaches provide visual guidance from the first-person perspective (1PP). MI training with visual guidance from the third-person perspective (3PP) remains largely unexplored. We argue that 3PP MI training has its own advantages and can supplement 1PP MI. For some movements beyond the view of 1PP, such as shoulder shrugging and other axial movements, MI are suitable performed under 3PP. However, the efficiency of existing paradigms for 3PP MI is unsatisfactory. We speculate that the absence of sense of body ownership (SOO) from 3PP could be one possible factor and hypothesize that 3PP MI could be enhanced by eliciting SOO over a 3PP avatar. Based on our hypothesis, a novel paradigm was proposed to enhance 3PP MI by inducing full-body illusion (FBI) from 3PP, which is similar to the so-called out-of-body experience (OBE), using synchronous visuo-tactile stimulus with VR. The event-related Electroencephalograph (EEG) desynchronization (ERD) at motor-related regions from 31 healthy participants were calculated and compared with a control paradigm without “OBE” FBI induction. This study attempts to enhance 3PP MI with FBI induction. It offers an opportunity to perform MI guided by action observation from 3PP with elicited SOO to the observed avatar. We believe that 3PP MI could provide more possibilities for effective rehabilitation training, when SOO could be elicited to a virtual avatar and the present work demonstrates its viability and effectiveness.