Neuroendocrine Response and State Anxiety Due to Psychosocial Stress Decrease after a Training with Subject's Own (but Not Another) Virtual Body: An RCT Study.

Previous research involving healthy participants has reported that seeing a moving virtual body from the first person perspective induces the illusion of ownership and agency over that virtual body. When a person is sitting and the virtual body runs, it is possible to measure physiological, behavioral and cognitive reactions that are comparable to those that occur during actual movement. Capitalizing on this evidence, we hypothesized that virtual training could also induce neuroendocrine effects that prompt a decreased psychosocial stress response, as occurs after physical training.

Changing your body changes your eating attitudes: embodiment of a slim virtual avatar induces avoidance of high-calorie food.

The virtual-reality full-body illusion paradigm has been suggested to not only trigger the illusory ownership of the avatar's body but also the attitudinal and behavioral components stereotypically associated to that kind of virtual body. In the present study, we investigated whether this was true for stereotypes related to body size: body satisfaction and eating control behavior. Healthy participants underwent the full-body illusion paradigm with an avatar having either a larger or a slimmer body than their own, and were assessed for implicit attitudes towards body image and food calorie content at baseline and after each full-body illusion session.

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.

We previously showed that the illusory sense of ownership and agency over a moving body in immersive virtual reality (displayed in a first-person perspective) can trigger subjective and physiological reactions on the real subject's body and, therefore, an acute improvement of cognitive functions after a single session of high-intensity intermittent exercise performed exclusively by one's own virtual body, similar to what happens when we actually do physical activity. As well as confirming previous results, here, we aimed at finding in the elderly an increased improvement after a longer virtual training with similar characteristics. Forty-two healthy older subjects (28 females, average age = 71.

Using Body Ownership to Modulate the Motor System in Stroke Patients.

Recent findings suggest that body ownership can activate the motor system in the absence of movement execution. Here, we investigated whether such a process promotes motor recovery in stroke patients. A group of patients with left-hemisphere damage ( = 12) and chronic motor deficits completed an immersive virtual reality training (three sessions of 15 min each week for 11 weeks).

The My Active and Healthy Aging ICT platform prevents quality of life decline in older adults: a randomised controlled study.

Introduction: Prevention of frailty is paramount in older adults. We evaluated the efficacy of a tailored multidomain intervention, monitored with the My Active and Healthy Aging platform, in reducing conversion from a prefrail status to overt frailty and preventing decline in quality of life.

Methods: We performed a multicentre, multicultural, randomised control study.

I'm a believer: Illusory self-generated touch elicits sensory attenuation and somatosensory evoked potentials similar to the real self-touch.

Sensory attenuation (i.e., the phenomenon whereby self-produced sensations are perceived as less intense compared to externally occurring ones) is among the neurocognitive processes that help distinguishing ourselves from others.

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

Physical activity, such as high-intensity intermittent aerobic exercise (HIE), can improve executive functions. Although performing strength or aerobic training might be problematic or not feasible for someone. An experimental situation where there is no actual movement, but the body shows physiological reactions, is during the illusion through immersive virtual reality (IVR).

The anatomo-clinical picture of the pathological embodiment over someone else's body part after stroke.

Recently, a monothematic delusion of body ownership due to brain damage (i.e., the embodiment of someone else's body part within the patient's sensorimotor system) has been extensively investigated.

Study Protocol: Does an Acute Intervention of High-Intensity Physical Exercise Followed by a Brain Training Video Game Have Immediate Effects on Brain Activity of Older People During Stroop Task in fMRI?-A Randomized Controlled Trial With Crossover Design.

: Elderly people are affected by processes leading to decline in various aspects of daily living that impair their quality of life. Regarding neurological aspects, executive functions have been shown to be valuable for daily life and to slow decline during aging. Most intervention studies intended to improve cognitive functions during aging specifically address long-term destructive processes and countermeasures.

Virtual training leads to real acute physical, cognitive, and neural benefits on healthy adults: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial.

Background: Keeping a certain level of physical activity has beneficial effects on the body itself but also, surprisingly, on cognition: specifically, physical high-intensity intermittent aerobic exercise (HIE) can show improvement on cognitive executive functions. Although, in some cases performing strength or aerobic training is problematic or not feasible. Immersive virtual reality (IVR) can induce the illusory feeling of ownership and agency over a moving virtual body, therefore showing comparable physiological reactions: for example, if an individual is sitting on a chair but his virtual body climbs a hill, the individual's heart rate increases coherently, as if he is actually walking.

Shared neurocognitive mechanisms of attenuating self-touch and illusory self-touch.

Despite the fact that any successful achievement of willed actions necessarily entails the sense of body ownership (the feeling of owning the moving body parts), it is still unclear how this happens. To address this issue at both behavioral and neural levels, we capitalized on sensory attenuation (SA) phenomenon (a self-generated stimulus is perceived as less intense than an identical externally generated stimulus). We compared the intensity of somatosensory stimuli produced by one's own intended movements and by movements of an embodied fake hand.

Body ownership increases the interference between observed and executed movements.

When we successfully achieve willed actions, the feeling that our moving body parts belong to the self (i.e., body ownership) is barely required.

Entrainment beyond embodiment.

Mutual adaptive timing (MAT), the capacity to adapt one's timing to the timing of a partner, is a form of interpersonal entrainment necessary to play music in ensemble. To this respect, two questions can be advanced. First, whether MAT can be seen also in non-musician populations.

Altered Sense of Body Ownership and Agency in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Its Dissociative Subtype: A Rubber Hand Illusion Study.

Traumatic experiences have been linked to the development of altered states of consciousness affecting bodily perception, including alterations in body ownership and in sense of agency, the conscious experience of the body as one's own and under voluntary control. Severe psychological trauma and prolonged distress may lead to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Together, symptoms of derealization and, related specifically to the sense of body ownership and agency, of depersonalization (where parts of the body or the entire body itself is perceived as detached and out of control), constitute the dissociative subtype (PTSD+DS).

The beneficial effect of a speaker's gestures on the listener's memory for action phrases: The pivotal role of the listener's premotor cortex.

Memory for action phrases improves in the listeners when the speaker accompanies them with gestures compared to when the speaker stays still. Since behavioral studies revealed a pivotal role of the listeners' motor system, we aimed to disentangle the role of primary motor and premotor cortices. Participants had to recall phrases uttered by a speaker in two conditions: in the gesture condition, the speaker performed gestures congruent with the action; in the no-gesture condition, the speaker stayed still.

On the relation between body ownership and sense of agency: A link at the level of sensory-related signals.

The relation between sense of body ownership and sense of agency is still highly debated. Here we investigated in a large sample of healthy participants the associations between several implicit and explicit indexes of the two senses. Specifically, we examined the correlations between proprioceptive shift (implicit measure) and questionnaire on the subjective experience of ownership (explicit measure) within the rubber hand illusion paradigm (body ownership), and intentional binding (implicit measure), attenuation of the intensity of auditory outcomes of actions (implicit measure) and questionnaire on the subjective experience of authorship (explicit measure) within the Libet's clock paradigm (sense of agency).

"As long as that is my hand, that willed action is mine": Timing of agency triggered by body ownership.

We investigated whether agency triggered by body ownership shares similar temporal constraints with agency induced by actual movements. We compared agency over the movements of the own hand, a fake hand and an embodied fake hand when they pressed a button delivering a stimulus to the participant's body after 500, 1000 or 2000 ms. In the first two delays, the movement of the embodied fake hand was misattributed to the participant's own will and the stimulus intensity was attenuated, as it happened when the own hand delivered the stimulus.

Movements and body ownership: Evidence from the rubber hand illusion after mechanical limb immobilization.

There is no consensus on whether, and to what extent, actions contribute to constructing awareness of one's own body. Here we investigated at both physiological and behavioral level whether a prolonged limb immobilization affects body ownership. We tested a group of healthy participants, whose left-hand movements were prevented by a cast for one week, and a control group without any movement restriction.

Comparing intensities and modalities within the sensory attenuation paradigm: Preliminary evidence.

It is well-documented that the intensity of a self-generated somatosensory stimulus is perceived to be attenuated in respect to an identical stimulus generated by others. At present, it is not clear whether such a phenomenon, known as somatosensory attenuation, is based not only on feedforward motor signals but also on re-afferences towards the body. To answer this question, in the present pilot investigation on twelve healthy subjects, three types of stimulations (sensory non-nociceptive electrical - ES, nociceptive electrical - NES, and vibrotactile - VTS) and intensities (1 = sensory threshold ∗ 2.

That's my hand! Therefore, that's my willed action: How body ownership acts upon conscious awareness of willed actions.

Whether and how body ownership ("this body is mine") contributes to human conscious experience of voluntary action is still unclear. In order to answer this question, here we incorporated two signatures (i.e.

"I can't tell whether it's my hand": a pilot study of the neurophenomenology of body representation during the rubber hand illusion in trauma-related disorders.

Background: Early traumatic experiences are thought to be causal factors in the development of trauma-related dissociative experiences, including depersonalization and derealization. The rubber hand illusion (RHI), a well-known paradigm that measures multi-sensorial integration of a rubber hand into one's own body representation, has been used to investigate alterations in the experience of body ownership and of body representation. Critically, however, it has never been studied in individuals with trauma-related disorders.

Sensing the body, representing the body: Evidence from a neurologically based delusion of body ownership.

Humans experience their own body as unitary and monolithic in nature. However, recent findings in cognitive neuroscience seem to suggest that body awareness has a complex and multifaceted structure that can be dissociated in several subcomponents, possibly underpinned by different brain circuits. In the present paper, we focus on a recently reported neuropsychological disorder of body ownership in which patients misattribute to themselves someone else's arm and its movements.