Heartbeat-evoked potentials following voluntary hyperventilation in epilepsy patients: respiratory influences on cardiac interoception.

Introduction: Current evidence indicates a modulating role of respiratory processes in cardiac interoception, yet whether altered breathing patterns influence heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEP) remains inconclusive.

Methods: Here, we examined the effects of voluntary hyperventilation (VH) as part of a clinical routine examination on scalp-recorded HEPs in epilepsy patients ( = 80).

Results: Using cluster-based permutation analyses, HEP amplitudes were compared across pre-VH and post-VH conditions within young and elderly subgroups, as well as for the total sample.

Keeping up with ourselves: Multimodal processes underlying body ownership across the lifespan.

The sense of a bodily self is thought to depend on adaptive weighting and integration of bodily afferents and prior beliefs. While the physical body changes in shape, size, and functionality across the lifespan, the sense of body ownership remains relatively stable. Yet, little is known about how multimodal integration underlying such sense of ownership is altered in ontogenetic periods of substantial physical changes.

Effects of environmental colours in virtual reality: Physiological arousal affected by lightness and hue.

It is a popular belief that colours impact one's psychological and affective functioning. However, clear-cut scientific evidence is still lacking, largely due to methodological challenges. Virtual reality (VR) enabled us to control and modify the environment.

Cardiac interoception in infants: Behavioral and neurophysiological measures in various emotional and self-related contexts.

Interoception, the perception of internal bodily signals, is fundamental to our sense of self. Even though theoretical accounts suggest an important role for interoception in the development of the self, empirical investigations are limited, particularly in infancy. Previous studies used preferential-looking paradigms to assess the detection of sensorimotor and multisensory contingencies in infancy, usually related to proprioception and touch.

Is this my foot? Experimentally induced disownership in individuals with body integrity dysphoria.

In body integrity dysphoria (BID), otherwise healthy individuals feel like a part of their physical body does not belong to them despite normal sensorimotor functioning. Theoretical and empirical evidence suggested aweakened integration of the affected body part into higher-order multisensory cortical body networks. Here, we used a multisensory stimulation paradigm in mixed reality to modulate and investigate multisensory processing underlying body (dis)ownership in individuals with BID of the lower limb.

Development of the bodily self: Effects of visuomotor synchrony and visual appearance on virtual embodiment in children and adults.

The sense of a bodily self is thought to depend on adaptive weighting and integration of bodily afferents and prior beliefs. Evidence from studies using paradigms such as the rubber hand illusion and full body illusion suggests changes in the integration of visuotactile bodily signals throughout childhood. Here, we extended this line of research by assessing how bottom-up visuomotor synchrony and expectancy, modulated by visual appearance of virtual avatars, contribute to embodiment in children.

Staying in touch with our bodies: Stronger sense of ownership during self- compared to other touch despite temporal mismatches.

Self-touch is considered important for bodily self-consciousness and self-other distinction and has been reported to improve clinical symptoms of disembodiment. To investigate the link between self-touch and disembodiment in healthy participants, we studied the effect of self-touch versus touch produced by another person (other-touch) on experimentally induced disembodiment. In a mixed reality paradigm, across two experiments, participants could see their own body and surroundings with a controllable visual delay and either stroked their own hand with a paintbrush or were stroked with it by the experimenter.

Perception of Our Own Body Influences Self-Concept and Self-Incoherence Impairs Episodic Memory.

How does our body affect the way we think about our personality? We addressed this question by eliciting the perceptual illusion that pairs of friends swapped bodies with each other. We found that during the illusion, the participants rated their own personality characteristics more similarly to the way they previously rated their friend's personality, and this flexible adjustment of self-concept to the "new" bodily self was related to the strength of illusory ownership of the friend's body. Moreover, a subsequent memory test showed that personality traits rated during the friend-body-swap illusion were generally remembered worse than traits rated during the control conditions; importantly, however, this impairment of episodic recognition memory was reduced for the participants who considerably adjusted their self-concept during the illusory body swapping.

Psychometrics of Disembodiment and Its Differential Modulation by Visuomotor and Visuotactile Mismatches.

Altered states of embodiment are fundamental to the scientific understanding of bodily self consciousness. The feeling of disembodiment during everyday activities is common to clinical conditions; however, the direct study of disembodiment in experimental setups is rare compared to the extensive investigation of illusory embodiment of an external object. Using mixed reality to modulate embodiment through temporally mismatching sensory signals from the own body, we assessed how such mismatches affect phenomenal and physiological aspects of embodiment and measured perceptual thresholds for these across multimodal signals.