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.

翻译：身体自我意识的核心在于对自身肢体所有权的感知。为深入理解大脑编码自我身体的机制，近年来研究者致力于构建统一的理论框架以解释相关行为与神经生理现象。其中亟待解释的核心问题在于橡胶手错觉等身体错觉究竟如何产生。尽管现有研究从概念层面描述了身体自我意识的机制及可能相关脑区，但现有理论模型仍缺乏对大脑编码身体感知的计算机制，以及主观体验的身体错觉如何通过神经网络生成的解释。本文整合身体自我意识的生物学发现，提出一种脑启发的身体自我感知模型，该模型无需监督信号即可自主构建对身体的感知。我们在包括iCub仿人机器人和模拟环境在内的平台上，通过六组橡胶手错觉实验成功验证了该计算模型。实验结果表明，该模型不仅能完美复现生物实验中猴子行为与神经数据，更因其生物可解释性优势，可从神经元层面合理阐释橡胶手错觉的成因与结果，为揭示橡胶手错觉产生的计算与神经机制提供了重要贡献。