Gulliver’s virtual travels: active embodiment in extreme body sizes for modulating our body representations

Serino, Silvia; Scarpina, Federica; Chirico, Alice; Dakanalis, Antonios; Lernia, Daniele Di; Colombo, Desirèe; Catallo, Valentina; Pedroli, Elisa; Riva, Giuseppe

doi:10.1007/s10339-020-00977-5

Cited by 13 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…However, the perception of one's own body size differentially changed according to the avatar's body size: participants perceived themselves as slimmer after the slim condition and larger after the large condition. In agreement with previous research in healthy individuals, these findings confirm that the subjective feeling of owning a virtual body emerges regardless of its size [ 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 ] and that such illusory experience temporarily affects the perceived own body size in the direction of the avatar's size [ 41 , 42 , 45 , 46 , 47 ].…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

“…This idea is rather consistent with the fact that, in general, non-conscious mechanisms can be key factors in healthy behavior since, often existing choices impacting heath are not accessible to introspection [ 40 ]. Previous studies that manipulated body size by means of the full body illusion have shown that the subjective feeling of owning a virtual body emerged regardless of its visual size [ 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 ] and that such illusory experience temporarily affected the perceived own body size in the direction of the avatar's size [ 41 , 42 , 45 , 46 , 47 ]. With respect to the impact of the avatar's size on the related implicit attitudes, however, only two studies have to date experimentally investigated it [ 42 , 48 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Changing your body changes your eating attitudes: embodiment of a slim virtual avatar induces avoidance of high-calorie food

Tambone

Poggio

Pyasik

et al. 2021

Heliyon

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The virtual-reality full-body illusion paradigm has been suggested to not only trigger the illusory ownership of the avatar's body but also the attitudinal and behavioral components stereotypically associated to that kind of virtual body. In the present study, we investigated whether this was true for stereotypes related to body size: body satisfaction and eating control behavior. Healthy participants underwent the full-body illusion paradigm with an avatar having either a larger or a slimmer body than their own, and were assessed for implicit attitudes towards body image and food calorie content at baseline and after each full-body illusion session. Results showed that the illusion emerged regardless of the avatar's body size, whereas the perceived dimension of the own body size changed according to the avatar's body size (i.e., participants felt to be slimmer after embodying their slim avatar and larger after embodying their large avatar). Crucially, we found that implicit attitudes towards food, but not those towards one's own body, were modulated by the size of the virtual body. Compared to baseline, ownership of a slimmer avatar increased the avoidance of high-calorie food, whereas ownership of a larger avatar did not induce changes. Our findings suggest that the illusory feeling of being slimmer drives also the food-related stereotypes associated with that body size, increasing the regulation of eating behaviors.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changing your body changes your eating attitudes: embodiment of a slim virtual avatar induces avoidance of high-calorie food

Tambone

Poggio

Pyasik

et al. 2021

Heliyon

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Importantly, this effect was independent of the subjective feeling of embodiment, and in fact, could also be induced by the vision of a small body. These results are partially in line with a recent paper by Serino and collaborators (2020) revealing that the embodiment over a smaller body induced a significant reduction in participants’ body image.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

I am the metre: The representation of one’s body size affects the perception of tactile distances on the body

Tosi

Maravita

Romano

2021

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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Humans must ground the perception of one’s body in a mental representation to move in space and interact with objects. This representation can be temporarily altered artificially. In the Full-Body Illusion (FBI), participants see a virtual (or filmed) body receiving a tactile stimulation. When participants receive touches on their body similarly to the seen one (i.e., homologous location and synchronous timing), they embody the seen alien body. While the subjective embodiment of alien bodies of different sizes has been already manipulated with the FBI, it remains unexplored whether the body-metric perception is impacted too. We first developed a new setup for the FBI using 360° videos to favour the embodiment. The FBI was induced for bodies of three sizes adopting anatomical and non-anatomical viewpoints, and we measured the subjective embodiment. The results suggest that humans can embody normal size or bigger bodies seen from anatomical viewpoints, but not smaller ones. We then investigated if the FBI modulates the body-metric representation. We found that the resized bodies' vision affects the perception of one’s body-metric representation, but this was independent of the embodiment, suggesting that the FBI alters the body representation at different levels with a specific impact.

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“…Later, Banakou et al used VR to embody participants in a child's body and found it not only affecting the perceived size of objects, but also participants' associated personality traits (Banakou et al, 2013). Serino et al found that embodying bodies of extreme sizes affected participants' judgements of the properties of their own bodies (Serino et al, 2020).…”

Section: Perception Of Sizes and Distancesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Body Scaling Effect and Its Impact on Physics Plausibility

Pouke

Center

Chambers

et al. 2022

Front. Virtual Real.

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In this study we investigated the effect of body ownership illusion-based body scaling on physics plausibility in Virtual Reality (VR). Our interest was in examining whether body ownership illusion-based body scaling could affect the plausibility of rigid body dynamics similarly to altering VR users' scale by manipulating their virtual interpupillary distance and viewpoint height. The procedure involved the conceptual replication of two previous studies. We investigated physics plausibility with 40 participants under two conditions. In our synchronous condition, we used visuo-tactile stimuli to elicit a body ownership illusion of inhabiting an invisible doll-sized body on participants reclining on an exam table. Our asynchronous condition was otherwise similar, but the visuo-tactile stimuli were provided asynchronously to prevent the onset of the body ownership illusion. We were interested in whether the correct approximation of physics (true physics) or physics that are incorrect and appearing as if the environment is five times larger instead (movie physics) appear more realistic to participants as a function of body scale. We found that movie physics did appear more realistic to participants under the body ownership illusion condition. However, our hypothesis that true physics would appear more realistic in the asynchronous condition was unsupported. Our exploratory analyses revealed that movie physics were perceived as plausible under both conditions. Moreover, we were not able to replicate previous findings from literature concerning object size estimations while inhabiting a small invisible body. However, we found a significant opposite effect regarding size estimations; the object sizes were on average underestimated during the synchronous visuo-tactile condition when compared to the asynchronous condition. We discuss these unexpected findings and the potential reasons for the results, and suggest avenues for future research.

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Gulliver’s virtual travels: active embodiment in extreme body sizes for modulating our body representations

Cited by 13 publications

References 53 publications

Changing your body changes your eating attitudes: embodiment of a slim virtual avatar induces avoidance of high-calorie food

Changing your body changes your eating attitudes: embodiment of a slim virtual avatar induces avoidance of high-calorie food

I am the metre: The representation of one’s body size affects the perception of tactile distances on the body

The Body Scaling Effect and Its Impact on Physics Plausibility

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