Document Detail


First person experience of body transfer in virtual reality.
MedLine Citation:
PMID:  20485681     Owner:  NLM     Status:  MEDLINE    
Abstract/OtherAbstract:
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.
Authors:
Mel Slater; Bernhard Spanlang; Maria V Sanchez-Vives; Olaf Blanke
Publication Detail:
Type:  Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't     Date:  2010-05-12
Journal Detail:
Title:  PloS one     Volume:  5     ISSN:  1932-6203     ISO Abbreviation:  PLoS ONE     Publication Date:  2010  
Date Detail:
Created Date:  2010-05-20     Completed Date:  2010-09-07     Revised Date:  2010-09-28    
Medline Journal Info:
Nlm Unique ID:  101285081     Medline TA:  PLoS One     Country:  United States    
Other Details:
Languages:  eng     Pagination:  e10564     Citation Subset:  IM    
Affiliation:
Institució Catalana Recerca i Estudis Avançats, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain. melslater@gmail.com
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MeSH Terms
Descriptor/Qualifier:
Adult
Body Image*
Heart Rate / physiology
Humans
Male
Questionnaires
User-Computer Interface*
Visual Perception / physiology*
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