Abstract It is well known that the human brain continuously predicts the sensory consequences of its own body movements, which typically results in sensory attenuation. Yet, the extent and exact mechanisms underlying sensory attenuation are still debated. To explore this issue, we asked participants to decide which of two visual stimuli was of higher contrast in a virtual reality situation where one of the stimuli could appear behind the participants’ invisible moving hand or not. Over two experiments, we measured the effects of such “virtual occlusion” on first-order sensitivity and on metacognitive monitoring. Our findings show that self-generated hand movements reduced the apparent contrast of the stimulus. This result can be explained by the active inference theory. Moreover, sensory attenuation seemed to affect only first-order sensitivity and not (second-order) metacognitive judgments of confidence.

中文翻译：

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与对比挥手告别：自我产生的手部动作减弱了视觉灵敏度

摘要众所周知，人脑不断预测其自身运动的感觉后果，通常会导致感觉衰减。然而，关于感觉衰减的程度和确切机制仍存在争议。为了探讨这个问题，我们要求参与者确定在虚拟现实情况下，其中一个刺激可能出现在参与者看不见的动手后面或不在后面的两个虚拟视觉刺激中哪个具有较高的对比度。在两个实验中，我们测量了这种“虚拟遮挡”对一阶敏感性和元认知监控的影响。我们的研究结果表明，自我产生的手部运动降低了刺激的明显反差。这个结果可以用主动推理理论来解释。而且，