Check out the full pre-print now: doi.org/10.1101/2025.06.16.658246. This work was truly a collaborative and interdisciplinary effort, and we’d like to thank all of our collaborators, and the over 100 participants that made this work possible! @plasticity-lab.bsky.social

Following Third thumb training, markerless hand tracking revealed reduced co-usage amongst the biological fingers as the Third Thumb became integrated into the hand’s coordination patterns

To explore how sensorimotor experience refines this representation, participants then underwent 7 days of motor training involving Third Thumb-biological hand collaboration, or our control group instead trained to play the piano keyboard

Despite the tasks being designed for the artificial systems, participants performed equally, or even outperformed, with the natural feedback, demonstrating that meaningful, interpretable information can be extracted from the natural feedback across versatile task demands

However, despite having no artificial feedback, we have previously demonstrated that people can perform a coordination task with the Third Thumb when blindfolded, relying on a sense of proprioceptive awareness of the robotic digit

Excited to share our new interdisciplinary work exploring the sensory representation of an artificial body part, combing datasets and methodologies to explore sensorimotor integration of the Third Thumb, a 2 DoF hand augmentation device (@daniclode.bsky.social) doi.org/10.1101/2025.06.16.658246