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I'm not sure that it makes sense to me that this explains the feeling a presence when no one's there since in this case there was someone behind them, its just

I'm not sure that it makes sense to me that this explains the feeling a presence when no one's there since in this case there was someone behind them, its just happened to be a robot. Instead it seems to me that it just shows that the brain doesn't always realize that its actions caused an event if there is enough of a delay. This could be the explanation for feeling a presence if the person's own actions are causing the sensations that the brain is misinterpreting. However, the article doesn't seem to me to present evidence that that is necessarily the case. Still an interesting finding though!

xg15 9y ago
The difference was though that the participants didn't experience FoP when the robots were perfectly synched - even though the sensation that was caused was exactly the same. I think the bigger point is the idea that FoP might be caused by the brain not correctly matching its own actions with sensations caused by those actions. The example they chose to test that hypothesis might not have been the best, but it's certainly a good starting point to think up better experiments. The sample size was also very small (12 people I think) - so I don't think they were planning to make any definite claims. This seems to me like a typical case of a "more research is needed" paper hyped up to "scientists discovered that..." by the press. Nevertheless, I think it's an interesting direction to continue research in. (Incidentally, it's amazing that the brain actually does attempt to match up actions and sensations - shows once again that biological mechanisms are a lot more sophisticated than one might think at first glance)
- new299 9y ago
  Scientists often hype the claims in their own papers, in this case: "These data show that the illusion of feeling another person nearby is caused by misperceiving the source and identity of sensorimotor (tactile, proprioceptive, and motor) signals of one’s own body." Which for a paper is quite a strong assertion (paper appears to be open access and is cited in the article by the way).
- phkahler 9y ago
  >> The difference was though that the participants didn't experience FoP when the robots were perfectly synched - even though the sensation that was caused was exactly the same. If the back rub robot is in sync with your own hand movements, you can tell that the sensation is cause by yourself - because it IS. When they introduce the delay, they experience it as someone else because it IS. The difference is that the time delay prevents them from realizing they are controlling the other entity so they attribute it to someone else. This offers no explanation for the feeling outside the context of the experiment.

xg15 9y ago

The difference was though that the participants didn't experience FoP when the robots were perfectly synched - even though the sensation that was caused was exactly the same. I think the bigger point is the idea that FoP might be caused by the brain not correctly matching its own actions with sensations caused by those actions. The example they chose to test that hypothesis might not have been the best, but it's certainly a good starting point to think up better experiments. The sample size was also very small (12 people I think) - so I don't think they were planning to make any definite claims. This seems to me like a typical case of a "more research is needed" paper hyped up to "scientists discovered that..." by the press. Nevertheless, I think it's an interesting direction to continue research in. (Incidentally, it's amazing that the brain actually does attempt to match up actions and sensations - shows once again that biological mechanisms are a lot more sophisticated than one might think at first glance)

new299 9y ago
Scientists often hype the claims in their own papers, in this case: "These data show that the illusion of feeling another person nearby is caused by misperceiving the source and identity of sensorimotor (tactile, proprioceptive, and motor) signals of one’s own body." Which for a paper is quite a strong assertion (paper appears to be open access and is cited in the article by the way).
phkahler 9y ago
>> The difference was though that the participants didn't experience FoP when the robots were perfectly synched - even though the sensation that was caused was exactly the same. If the back rub robot is in sync with your own hand movements, you can tell that the sensation is cause by yourself - because it IS. When they introduce the delay, they experience it as someone else because it IS. The difference is that the time delay prevents them from realizing they are controlling the other entity so they attribute it to someone else. This offers no explanation for the feeling outside the context of the experiment.