A deep active inference model of the rubber-hand illusion

Abstract: Understanding how perception and action deal with sensorimotor conflicts, such as the rubber-hand illusion (RHI), is essential to understand how the body adapts to uncertain situations. Recent results in humans have shown that the RHI not only produces a change in the perceived arm location, but also causes involuntary forces. Here, we describe a deep active inference agent in a virtual environment, which we subjected to the RHI, that is able to account for these results. We show that our model, which deals with visual high-dimensional inputs, produces similar perceptual and force patterns to those found in humans.