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是对自身身体所有权的感知。为了深入理解大脑编码自我身体的机制，近期研究尝试构建统一的理论框架来解释相关行为与神经生理现象。其中需要阐释的核心问题是橡胶手错觉等身体错觉究竟如何产生。尽管现有研究对身体自我意识的机制及可能涉及的相关脑区进行了概念性描述，但现有理论模型仍缺乏对大脑编码自我身体感知的计算机制以及神经网络如何产生主观身体错觉的解释。为此，我们整合身体自我意识的生物学发现，提出了一种类脑身体自我感知模型，该模型可在无监督信号条件下自主构建身体自我感知。通过在包括iCub仿人机器人和仿真环境在内的平台开展的六组橡胶手错觉实验，我们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学实验中猴子行为与神经数据，还因其生物可解释性优势，能从神经元层面合理解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新见解。