Studies about the motor intention

The aim of this research line is to understand the contribution of the sense of body ownership to human conscious experience of voluntary action.
Exploiting a famous perceptual multisensory procedure called the rubber hand illusion (RHI), we showed that illusory ownership over a moving fake hand, that delivers an electrical stimulation over the other subject’s hand (8) within a certain time-window (9), triggers an illusory agency over its movements at both explicit (misattribution of the intention to the own will) and implicit level (the intensity of the generated stimulus was attenuated, as it happens when the own hand actually delivers the stimulus) (10). In addition, these results were corroborated by physiological data (11,12).

Related publications
8. Burin D, Battaglini A, Pia L, Falvo G, Palombella M, Salatino A. Comparing intensities and modalities within the sensory attenuation paradigm: Preliminary evidence. J Adv Res. 2017;8(6):649–53. doi: 10.1016/j.jare.2017.08.001.
9. Burin D, Pyasik M, Ronga I, Cavallo M, Salatino A, Pia L. “As long as that is my hand, that willed action is mine”: Timing of agency triggered by body ownership. Conscious Cogn. 2018;58:186–92. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2017.12.005.
10. Burin D, Pyasik M, Salatino A, Pia L. That’s my hand! Therefore, that’s my willed action: How body ownership acts upon conscious awareness of willed actions. Cognition. 2017;166:164–73. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.05.035.
11. Pyasik M, Salatino A, Burin D, Berti A, Ricci R, Pia L. Shared neurocognitive mechanisms of attenuating self-touch and illusory self-touch. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2019;14(2):119–27. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsz002.
12. Pyasik M, Ronga I, Burin D, Salatino A, Sarasso P, Garbarini F, et al. I’m a believer: Illusory self-generated touch elicits sensory attenuation and somatosensory evoked potentials similar to the real self-touch. Neuroimage. 2021; doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.117727.