Illusory ownership of a virtual child body causes overestimation of object sizes and implicit attitude changes

Banakou, Domna; Groten, Raphaela; Slater, Mel

doi:10.1073/pnas.1306779110

Cited by 544 publications

(557 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…These findings are fundamentally important, as they suggest a link between the ongoing perceptual experiences of the body and the world from the first-person perspective and the hippocampal episodic memory system. This empirical observation provides a basis for models of episodic memory (1, 2, 7, 8, 29, 31, 32, 34) and self-consciousness (10,13,14,37), and it is a striking example of embodied cognition (38,39), in which multisensory body self-perception directly influences a specific higher cognitive function, namely the episodic long-term memory system. Under normal conditions, an individual experiences the world from the perspective of the physical body, and his/her center of The activation of the previously well-established network of episodic retrieval of life events when contrasting the retrieval conditions with the baseline imagery condition (main effect of retrieval) (all activations show P < 0.05, corrected; the scale denotes t values; the activations were superimposed on a mean T1-weighted structural scan in the MNI standard space generated from the structural scans of all participants, and masked with the search space of the episodic autobiographical network).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Out-of-body–induced hippocampal amnesia

Bergouignan

Nyberg

Ehrsson

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

160

192

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Theoretical models have suggested an association between the ongoing experience of the world from the perspective of one's own body and hippocampus-based episodic memory. This link has been supported by clinical reports of long-term episodic memory impairments in psychiatric conditions with dissociative symptoms, in which individuals feel detached from themselves as if having an out-of-body experience. Here, we introduce an experimental approach to examine the necessary role of perceiving the world from the perspective of one's own body for the successful episodic encoding of real-life events. While participants were involved in a social interaction, an out-of-body illusion was elicited, in which the sense of bodily self was displaced from the real body to the other end of the testing room. This condition was compared with a well-matched in-body illusion condition, in which the sense of bodily self was colocalized with the real body. In separate recall sessions, performed ∼1 wk later, we assessed the participants' episodic memory of these events. The results revealed an episodic recollection deficit for events encoded out-of-body compared with in-body. Functional magnetic resonance imaging indicated that this impairment was specifically associated with activity changes in the posterior hippocampus. Collectively, these findings show that efficient hippocampus-based episodic-memory encoding requires a first-person perspective of the natural spatial relationship between the body and the world. Our observations have important implications for theoretical models of episodic memory, neurocognitive models of self, embodied cognition, and clinical research into memory deficits in psychiatric disorders.self-consciousness | body illusion | dissociative experience | autobiographical memory

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Out-of-body–induced hippocampal amnesia

Bergouignan

Nyberg

Ehrsson

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

160

192

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“…Importantly, two of these studies Maister et al, 2013) found that the amount that participant's racial bias decreased was correlated with the strength of the ownership they felt for the hand, suggesting that this effect is partly caused by the increased overlap between the self and the racial out-group. Effects of embodiment on racial bias have also been found when using VR to generate a full-body illusion (Peck, Seinfeld, Aglioti, & Slater, 2013) and similar changes in implicit attitudes to children have been found after embodying a child avatar (Banakou, Groten, & Slater, 2013). However, another recent study (Estudillo & Bindemann, 2016) found no evidence that multisensory stimulation of the face led to changes in racial bias.…”

Section: Embodimentmentioning

confidence: 82%

Putting Ourselves in Another’s Skin: Using the Plasticity of Self-Perception to Enhance Empathy and Decrease Prejudice

Farmer

Maister

2017

Soc Just Res

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The self is one the most important concepts in social cognition and plays a crucial role in determining questions such as which social groups we view ourselves as belonging to and how we relate to others. In the past decade, the self has also become an important topic within cognitive neuroscience with an explosion in the number of studies seeking to understand how different aspects of the self are represented within the brain. In this paper, we first outline the recent research on the neurocognitive basis of the self and highlight a key distinction between two forms of self-representation. The first is the ''bodily'' self, which is thought to be the basis of subjective experience and is grounded in the processing of sensorimotor signals. The second is the ''conceptual'' self, which develops through our interactions of other and is formed of a rich network of associative and semantic information. We then investigate how both the bodily and conceptual self are related to social cognition with an emphasis on how self-representations are involved in the processing and creation of prejudice. We then highlight new research demonstrating that the bodily and conceptual self are both malleable and that this malleability can be harnessed in order to achieve a reduction in social prejudice. In particular, we will outline strong evidence that modulating people's perceptions of the bodily self can lead to changes in attitudes at the conceptual level. We will highlight a series of studies demonstrating that social attitudes towards various social out-groups (e.g. racial groups) can lead to a reduction in prejudice towards that group. Finally, we seek to place these findings in a broader social context by considering how innovations in virtual reality technology can allow experiences of taking on another's identity are likely to become both more commonplace and more convincing in the future and the various opportunities and risks associated with using such technology to reduce prejudice.

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“…Based on past results we expected that the sync condition would result in a substantially greater illusion of body ownership over the VB than the async condition (11,13,(21)(22)(23). The vibrations factor was designed to enhance the sense of speaking by applying vibratory feedback on the thyroid cartilage to coincide with the period that the embodied avatar was speaking (Von) or no vibratory feedback (Voff).…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…When average-sized adults have an illusion of body ownership over smaller or larger bodies, this results in changes in the perception of object sizes (12). Even more remarkably, the illusion of body ownership of adults over a virtual child body leads to overestimation of object sizes and changes in implicit attitudes about the self substantially beyond changes induced by the illusion of ownership of an adult shaped body of the same size as the child (13). Hence the type of body appears to carry with it physiological, perceptual, and even deepseated attitudinal correlates.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Body ownership causes illusory self-attribution of speaking and influences subsequent real speaking

Banakou

Slater

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

Self Cite

156

172

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When we carry out an act, we typically attribute the action to ourselves, the sense of agency. Explanations for agency include conscious prior intention to act, followed by observation of the sensory consequences; brain activity that involves the feed-forward prediction of the consequences combined with rapid inverse motor prediction to fine-tune the action in real time; priming where there is, e.g., a prior command to perform the act; a cause (the intention to act) preceding the effect (the results of the action); and commonsense rules of attribution of physical causality satisfied. We describe an experiment where participants falsely attributed an act to themselves under conditions that apparently cannot be explained by these theories. A life-sized virtual body (VB) seen from the firstperson perspective in 3D stereo, as if substituting the real body, was used to induce the illusion of ownership over the VB. Half of the 44 experimental participants experienced VB movements that were synchronous with their own movements (sync), and the other half asynchronous (async). The VB, seen in a mirror, spoke with corresponding lip movements, and for half of the participants this was accompanied by synchronous vibrotactile stimulation on the thyroid cartilage (Von) but this was not so for the other half. Participants experiencing sync misattributed the speaking to themselves and also shifted the fundamental frequency of their later utterances toward the stimulus voice. Von also contributed to these results. We show that these findings can be explained by current theories of agency, provided that the critical role of ownership over the VB is taken into account.agency | body-ownership illusion | rubber-hand illusion | illusory speaking | vibrotactile stimulation T here is growing evidence that the brain does not treat our body as relatively fixed, changing only slowly through time, but that its body representation demonstrates high plasticity. Although this is counter to common sense, a number of findings have shown that simple experimental manipulations can generate the illusion that an external object is part of our body (1, 2), that a plastic manikin (3, 4), and even a body displayed in immersive virtual reality (IVR), is our body (5-7). Furthermore, evidence suggests that such illusions have physiological and psychological consequences. For example, the rubber-hand illusion (RHI), where participants feel a somatic sense of ownership over a rubber hand through synchronous multisensory stimulation on the rubber and corresponding hidden real hand (1), has been shown to lead to a cooling of the real hand (8) as well as an increase in its histamine reactivity (9). The RHI over a black rubber hand can lead to a reduction of implicit racial bias in light-skinned people (10). When light-skinned people have a dark-skinned VB that apparently substitutes their own body, in IVR-as seen directly and in a virtual mirror, and that moves like themselves-they have the illusion that the body is theirs, which also results in a reduction o...

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Illusory ownership of a virtual child body causes overestimation of object sizes and implicit attitude changes

Cited by 544 publications

References 41 publications

Out-of-body–induced hippocampal amnesia

Out-of-body–induced hippocampal amnesia

Putting Ourselves in Another’s Skin: Using the Plasticity of Self-Perception to Enhance Empathy and Decrease Prejudice

Body ownership causes illusory self-attribution of speaking and influences subsequent real speaking

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