Illusory ownership of a virtual child body causes overestimation of object sizes and implicit attitude changes
Top Cited Papers
Open Access
- 15 July 2013
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Vol. 110 (31), 12846-12851
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1306779110
Abstract
An illusory sensation of ownership over a surrogate limb or whole body can be induced through specific forms of multisensory stimulation, such as synchronous visuotactile tapping on the hidden real and visible rubber hand in the rubber hand illusion. Such methods have been used to induce ownership over a manikin and a virtual body that substitute the real body, as seen from first-person perspective, through a head-mounted display. However, the perceptual and behavioral consequences of such transformed body ownership have hardly been explored. In Exp. 1, immersive virtual reality was used to embody 30 adults as a 4-y-old child (condition C), and as an adult body scaled to the same height as the child (condition A), experienced from the first-person perspective, and with virtual and real body movements synchronized. The result was a strong body-ownership illusion equally for C and A. Moreover there was an overestimation of the sizes of objects compared with a nonembodied baseline, which was significantly greater for C compared with A. An implicit association test showed that C resulted in significantly faster reaction times for the classification of self with child-like compared with adult-like attributes. Exp. 2 with an additional 16 participants extinguished the ownership illusion by using visuomotor asynchrony, with all else equal. The size-estimation and implicit association test differences between C and A were also extinguished. We conclude that there are perceptual and probably behavioral correlates of body-ownership illusions that occur as a function of the type of body in which embodiment occurs.Keywords
This publication has 39 references indexed in Scilit:
- Experiencing ownership over a dark-skinned body reduces implicit racial biasCognition, 2013
- Extending Body Space in Immersive Virtual Reality: A Very Long Arm IllusionPLOS ONE, 2012
- Bodily illusions in health and disease: Physiological and clinical perspectives and the concept of a cortical ‘body matrix’Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2012
- Being Barbie: The Size of One’s Own Body Determines the Perceived Size of the WorldPLOS ONE, 2011
- Multisensory Stimulation Can Induce an Illusion of Larger Belly Size in Immersive Virtual RealityPLOS ONE, 2011
- Illusory Shrinkage and GrowthPsychological Science, 2010
- First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual RealityPLOS ONE, 2010
- Virtual Hand Illusion Induced by Visuomotor CorrelationsPLOS ONE, 2010
- Inducing illusory ownership of a virtual bodyFrontiers in Neuroscience, 2009
- If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body SwappingPLOS ONE, 2008