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.

Fluid face but not gender: Enfacement illusion through digital face filters does not affect gender identity.

It has been shown that observing a face being touched or moving in synchrony with our own face increases self-identification with the former which might alter both cognitive and affective processes. The induction of this phenomenon, termed enfacement illusion, has often relied on laboratory tools that are unavailable to a large audience. However, digital face filters applications are nowadays regularly used and might provide an interesting tool to study similar mechanisms in a wider population.

Different armpits under my new nose: Olfactory sex but not gender affects implicit measures of embodiment.

Conflicting multisensory signals may alter embodiment to produce self-identification with a foreign body, but the role of olfaction in this process has been overlooked. We studied in healthy participants how sex (male and female sweat odors) and gender (male and female cosmetic scents) olfactory stimuli contribute to embodiment. Participants saw, on a head mounted display, the first-person perspective of a sex mismatching person.

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.

Real Bodies Not Required? Placebo Analgesia and Pain Perception in Immersive Virtual and Augmented Reality.

Pain represents an embodied experience, wherein inferences are not only drawn from external sensory inputs, but also from bodily states. Previous research has demonstrated that a placebo administered to an embodied rubber hand can effectively induce analgesia, providing first evidence that placebos can work even when applied to temporarily embodied, artificial body parts. Using a heat pain paradigm, the present study investigates placebo analgesia and pain perception during virtual embodiment.

The monologue of the double: Allocentric reduplication of the own voice alters bodily self-perception.

During autoscopic phenomena, people perceive a double of themselves in extrapersonal space. Such clinical allocentric self-experiences sometimes co-occur with auditory hallucinations, yet experimental setups to induce similar illusions in healthy participants have generally neglected acoustic cues. We investigated whether feeling the presence of an auditory double could be provoked experimentally by recording healthy participants' own versus another person's voice and movements using binaural headphones from an egocentric (the participants' own) and an allocentric (a dummy head located elsewhere) perspective.

What Am I Drinking? Vision Modulates the Perceived Flavor of Drinks, but No Evidence of Flavor Altering Color Perception in a Mixed Reality Paradigm.

It is well established that vision, and in particular color, may modulate our experience of flavor. Such cross-modal correspondences have been argued to be bilateral, in the sense that one modality can modulate the other and vice versa. However, the amount of literature assessing how vision modulates flavor is remarkably larger than that directly assessing how flavor might modulate vision.

Effects of a virtual gender swap on social and temporal decision-making.

Mounting evidence has demonstrated that embodied virtual reality, during which physical bodies are replaced with virtual surrogates, can strongly alter cognition and behavior even when the virtual body radically differs from one's own. One particular emergent area of interest is the investigation of how virtual gender swaps can influence choice behaviors. Economic decision-making paradigms have repeatedly shown that women tend to display more prosocial sharing choices than men.

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.

How Does Embodying a Transgender Narrative Influence Social Bias? An Explorative Study in an Artistic Context.

Virtual reality (VR) protocols inducing illusory embodiment of avatars have shown a positive impact on participants' perception of outgroup members, in line with the idea that the simulation of another's sensorimotor states might underlie prosocial behavior. These studies, however, have been mostly confined to laboratory settings with student populations and the use of artificial avatars. In an interdisciplinary effort benefiting from the heterogeneous sample within a museum, we aimed at quantifying changes in interpersonal perception induced by embodying a transgender man narrating his life.

Being Short, Sweet, and Sour: Congruent Visuo-Olfactory Stimulation Enhances Illusory Embodiment.

Bodily self-identification has shown to be easily altered through spatiotemporally congruent multimodal signals. While such manipulations are mostly studied through visuo-tactile or visuo-motor stimulation, here we investigated whether congruent visuo-olfactory cues might enhance illusory self-identification with an arbitrary object. Using virtual reality, healthy individuals saw a grapefruit from its supposed first-person perspective that was touched in synchrony with their own body.

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.

The Tilted Self: Visuo-Graviceptive Mismatch in the Full-Body Illusion.

The bodily self is a fundamental part of human self-consciousness and relies on online multimodal information and prior beliefs about one's own body. While the contribution of the vestibular system in this process remains under-investigated, it has been theorized to be important. The present experiment investigates the influence of conflicting gravity-related visual and bodily information on the sense of a body and, vice versa, the influence of altered embodiment on verticality and own-body orientation perception.