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First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality

BACKGROUND: Altering the normal association between touch and its visual correlate can result in the illusory perception of a fake limb as part of our own body. Thus, when touch is seen to be applied to a rubber hand while felt synchronously on the corresponding hidden real hand, an illusion of owne...

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Autores principales: Slater, Mel, Spanlang, Bernhard, Sanchez-Vives, Maria V., Blanke, Olaf
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2010
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2868878/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20485681
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010564
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author Slater, Mel
Spanlang, Bernhard
Sanchez-Vives, Maria V.
Blanke, Olaf
author_facet Slater, Mel
Spanlang, Bernhard
Sanchez-Vives, Maria V.
Blanke, Olaf
author_sort Slater, Mel
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Altering the normal association between touch and its visual correlate can result in the illusory perception of a fake limb as part of our own body. Thus, when touch is seen to be applied to a rubber hand while felt synchronously on the corresponding hidden real hand, an illusion of ownership of the rubber hand usually occurs. The illusion has also been demonstrated using visuomotor correlation between the movements of the hidden real hand and the seen fake hand. This type of paradigm has been used with respect to the whole body generating out-of-the-body and body substitution illusions. However, such studies have only ever manipulated a single factor and although they used a form of virtual reality have not exploited the power of immersive virtual reality (IVR) to produce radical transformations in body ownership. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Here we show that a first person perspective of a life-sized virtual human female body that appears to substitute the male subjects' own bodies was sufficient to generate a body transfer illusion. This was demonstrated subjectively by questionnaire and physiologically through heart-rate deceleration in response to a threat to the virtual body. This finding is in contrast to earlier experimental studies that assume visuotactile synchrony to be the critical contributory factor in ownership illusions. Our finding was possible because IVR allowed us to use a novel experimental design for this type of problem with three independent binary factors: (i) perspective position (first or third), (ii) synchronous or asynchronous mirror reflections and (iii) synchrony or asynchrony between felt and seen touch. CONCLUSIONS: The results support the notion that bottom-up perceptual mechanisms can temporarily override top down knowledge resulting in a radical illusion of transfer of body ownership. The research also illustrates immersive virtual reality as a powerful tool in the study of body representation and experience, since it supports experimental manipulations that would otherwise be infeasible, with the technology being mature enough to represent human bodies and their motion.
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spelling pubmed-28688782010-05-19 First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality Slater, Mel Spanlang, Bernhard Sanchez-Vives, Maria V. Blanke, Olaf PLoS One Research Article BACKGROUND: Altering the normal association between touch and its visual correlate can result in the illusory perception of a fake limb as part of our own body. Thus, when touch is seen to be applied to a rubber hand while felt synchronously on the corresponding hidden real hand, an illusion of ownership of the rubber hand usually occurs. The illusion has also been demonstrated using visuomotor correlation between the movements of the hidden real hand and the seen fake hand. This type of paradigm has been used with respect to the whole body generating out-of-the-body and body substitution illusions. However, such studies have only ever manipulated a single factor and although they used a form of virtual reality have not exploited the power of immersive virtual reality (IVR) to produce radical transformations in body ownership. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Here we show that a first person perspective of a life-sized virtual human female body that appears to substitute the male subjects' own bodies was sufficient to generate a body transfer illusion. This was demonstrated subjectively by questionnaire and physiologically through heart-rate deceleration in response to a threat to the virtual body. This finding is in contrast to earlier experimental studies that assume visuotactile synchrony to be the critical contributory factor in ownership illusions. Our finding was possible because IVR allowed us to use a novel experimental design for this type of problem with three independent binary factors: (i) perspective position (first or third), (ii) synchronous or asynchronous mirror reflections and (iii) synchrony or asynchrony between felt and seen touch. CONCLUSIONS: The results support the notion that bottom-up perceptual mechanisms can temporarily override top down knowledge resulting in a radical illusion of transfer of body ownership. The research also illustrates immersive virtual reality as a powerful tool in the study of body representation and experience, since it supports experimental manipulations that would otherwise be infeasible, with the technology being mature enough to represent human bodies and their motion. Public Library of Science 2010-05-12 /pmc/articles/PMC2868878/ /pubmed/20485681 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010564 Text en Slater et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Slater, Mel
Spanlang, Bernhard
Sanchez-Vives, Maria V.
Blanke, Olaf
First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality
title First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality
title_full First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality
title_fullStr First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality
title_full_unstemmed First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality
title_short First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality
title_sort first person experience of body transfer in virtual reality
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2868878/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20485681
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010564
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