Neurocognitive consequences of hand augmentation

From hand tools to cyborgs, humans have long been fascinated by the opportunities afforded by augmenting ourselves. Here, we studied how motor augmentation with an extra robotic thumb (the Third Thumb) impacts the biological hand representation in the brains of able-bodied people. Participants were tested on a variety of behavioural and neuroimaging tests designed to interrogate the augmented hand’s representation before and after 5-days of semi-intensive training. Training improved the Thumb’s motor control, dexterity and hand-robot coordination, even when cognitive load was increased or when vision was occluded, and resulted in increased sense of embodiment over the robotic Thumb. Thumb usage also weakened natural kinematic hand synergies. Importantly, brain decoding of the augmented hand’s motor representation demonstrated mild collapsing of the canonical hand structure following training, suggesting that motor augmentation may disrupt the biological hand representation. Together, our findings unveil critical neurocognitive considerations for designing human body augmentation.