Virtual training leads to physical, cognitive and neural benefits in healthy adults

Repeated Exposure to Illusory Sense of Body Ownership and Agency Over a Moving Virtual Body Improves Executive Functioning and Increases Prefrontal Cortex Activity in the Elderly

“…Recent studies have shown that the illusory feeling of ownership and agency over the virtual body creates the necessary conditions to induce effects on the physiological (Martini et al, 2013;Kokkinara et al, 2016;Fossataro et al, 2020) or even components higher than the mere perceptual level, such as social (Peck et al, 2013;Banakou et al, 2018), neural (Seinfeld et al, 2021), or cognitive functions: concerning the latter, in our previous study, we demonstrated on young healthy participants acute improvement of cognitive (executive) functions after a high-intensity intermittent exercise performed exclusively by the considered-as-own virtual body (Burin et al, 2019c(Burin et al, , 2020. We argued that, despite the participants being completely still, the feeling of ownership and agency over the virtual body (only if displayed in a first-person perspective) (Kokkinara et al, 2016) induced a cascade of events (from the physiological activation of the heart rate to the increased neural activity over task-related areas), culminating in the improved cognitive performance immediately after the virtual exercise, comparable to what happens after a similar training performed by one's own physical body (Hyodo et al, 2016;Kujach et al, 2017).…”

“…The sample size was estimated using G * Power 3.1 with a priori power analysis for an F test with between-within interactions: considering the Stroop task's response time as the main outcome, we set a small to moderate effect size [f (V) = 0.4] (Byun et al, 2014;Monteiro-Junior et al, 2017a;Burin et al, 2020), so we calculated a total sample size of 52 subjects (with the α error probability set at 0.05 and power set at 0.8). We were able to recruit 46 subjects.…”

“…The IVR setup used in this study was the same as that already tested in Burin et al (2020), with the exceptions that, here, the RCT is a parallel-group design and the same intervention is repeated for 11 sessions for 20 min each (Mirelman et al, 2016;Monteiro-Junior et al, 2017b).…”

“…The intervention performed by the two groups was the same, except for the crucial difference made by the visual perspective: in the 1PP group, the virtual body was displayed in a first-person perspective, coherently with the real one, spatially overlapping it (Figure 3A), known to be the crucial condition to induce a sense of ownership and to create the virtual full-body illusion (Kokkinara et al, 2016;Burin et al, 2019aBurin et al, , 2020Neyret et al, 2020). In the 3PP group, the virtual body was located about 1.5 m to the left of the actual participant's position, resembling another person (Figure 3B) and not inducing the same illusion mentioned in the 1PP group (Pavone et al, 2016;Gonzalez-Liencres et al, 2020).…”

“…In the present study, in order to answer these questions, we adapted the same virtual training (Burin et al, 2019c(Burin et al, , 2020 to test its efficacy on a sample of 42 physically and neurologically healthy elderly (over 60 years old) and to compare the acute and long-term impacts on cognitive, physiological, and neural functions. We conducted a parallel-group randomized controlled trial (RCT) composed of a 6-week (twice a week) IVR intervention, each session including 20 min of virtual highintensity intermittent exercise (vHIE), alternating the avatar between fast walking and slowly walking every 2 min: while the participants were sitting still, they observed the virtual body, either in a first-person perspective (1PP, the experimental group) or a third-person perspective (3PP, the control group), performing the virtual exercise.…”