The development of bodily self‐consciousness: changing responses to the Full Body Illusion in childhood

Abstract

The present work investigates the development of bodily self‐consciousness and its relation to multisensory bodily information, by measuring for the first time the development of responses to the full body illusion in childhood. We tested three age groups of children: 6‐ to 7‐year‐olds (n = 28); 8‐ to 9‐year‐olds (n = 21); 10‐ to 11‐year‐olds (n = 19), and a group of adults (n = 31). Each participant wore a head‐mounted display (HMD) which displayed a view from a video camera positioned 2 metres behind their own back. Thus, they could view a virtual body from behind. We manipulated visuo‐tactile synchrony by showing the participants a view of their virtual back being stroked with a stick at the same time and same place as their real back (synchronous condition), or at different times and places (asynchronous condition). After each period of stroking, we measured three aspects of bodily self‐consciousness: drift in perceived self‐location, self‐identification with the virtual body, and touch referral to the virtual body. Results show that self‐identification with the virtual body was significantly stronger in the synchronous condition than in the asynchronous condition even in the youngest group tested; however, the size of this effect increased with age. Touch referral to the virtual body was greater in the synchronous condition than in the asynchronous condition only for 10‐ to 11‐year‐olds and adults. Drift in perceived self‐location was greater in the synchronous condition than in the asynchronous condition only for adults. Thus, the youngest age tested can self‐identify with a virtual body, but the links between multisensory signals and bodily self‐consciousness develop significantly across childhood. This suggests a long period of development of the bodily self and exciting potential for the use of virtual reality technologies with children.

Altered bodily self-consciousness and peripersonal space in autism

“…The FBI data show that agreement with illusion statements was signfiicantly higher in synchronous than asynchronous body conditions in the non-ASD group -as found previously (Aspell et al, 2012;Cowie, McKenna, Bremner, & Aspell, 2017;Ionta et al, 2011;Lenggenhager et al, 2007) -but did not differ in the ASD group. Moreover, neurotypical participants showed significantly greater self-identification with the virtual body in the synchronous condition and a greater self-location drift towards the virtual body during the synchronous condition, but this was not found for ASD participants.…”

Alice in Wonderland: The effects of body size and movement on children’s size perception and body representation in virtual reality

“…Whilst all children showed an adult-like effect of visuotactile synchrony on embodiment, younger children showed a large amount of proprioceptive drift regardless of synchrony. Young children also showed little effect of visuotactile synchrony in the FBI, reporting embodiment of the virtual body in both synchronous and asynchronous stroking conditions (Cowie, McKenna, Bremner, & Aspell, 2017). In all of these studies researchers concluded that visual capture is a particularly strong cue to embodiment for young children, as the sight of a hand or a body in peripersonal space was sufficient to evoke illusory ownership regardless of multisensory synchrony.…”

“…Thirdly, does body size affect size perception in children? As children embody virtual bodies to some extent regardless of visuotactile synchrony (Cowie et al, 2017), it was predicted that children might also embody a virtual body regardless of visuomotor synchrony. Additionally, since children's bodies change size frequently, it was thought that children would embody a virtual body regardless of its size.…”

“…Based on this theory, children would show and increasing effect of synchrony with age as they gain visuomotor experience. Indeed, Cowie et al (2017) found that the effect of full-body visuotactile synchrony on embodiment increased throughout childhood, reaching adult levels at 10-11 years. Therefore, visuotactile representations may be tuned with experience in a similar way to visuomotor representations.…”

The developing bodily self: How posture constrains body representation in childhood

“…Crucially, these are separable and will be addressed in this study through multiple measures. Recent findings also show that bottom-up information deriving from multisensory interactions between visual, tactile and proprioceptive cues is crucial for body representation in childhood (Cowie, Makin, & Bremner, 2013;Cowie, McKenna, Bremner, & Aspell, 2018;Cowie, Sterling, & Bremner, 2016). However, there is no direct research on how knowledge of body shape or layout constrains body representation in children.…”