If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping

By Valeria I. Petkova, H. Ehrsson, Justin M. Harris. PLoS ONE, 2008

903 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The concept of an individual swapping his or her body with that of another person has captured the imagination of writers and artists for decades. Although this topic has not been the subject of investigation in science, it exemplifies the fundamental question of why we have an ongoing experience of being located inside our bodies. Here we report a perceptual illusion of body-swapping that addresses directly this issue. Manipulation of the visual perspective, in combination with the receipt of correlated multisensory information from the body was sufficient to trigger the illusion that another person's body or an artificial body was one's own. This effect was so strong that people could experience being in another person's body when facing their own body and shaking hands with it. Our results are of fundamental importance because they identify the perceptual processes that produce the feeling of ownership of one's body.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/453a41fc7b9a5c9f588699d731c0dcee1532cef4

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Citations in the corpus

Inducing Illusory Ownership of a Virtual Body (2009, background): “More direct evidence has come from Petkova and Ehrsson (2008), who employed cameras attached to the head of a manikin that was looking down on the manikin’s body.”
Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality: The Body Shapes the Way We Play (2013, background): “In general, numerous studies in cognitive neuroscience and psychology have demonstrated that a fake body-part or a fake body can be illusorily experienced as the real body-part or the real body respectively, when the fake and real both receive spatiotemporally congruent multisensory and/or sensorimo”
Real Virtuality: A Code of Ethical Conduct. Recommendations for Good Scientific Practice and the Consumers of VR-Technology (2016, background): “This application would in principle allow for “body swapping,” in which users enter the bodies of others (Petkova and Ehrsson, 2008).”
My body in the brain: a neurocognitive model of body-ownership. (2010, positive): “Two further manipulations of the whole-body studies resulted in the illusion of bodyswapping (Petkova & Ehrsson, 2008) and changes in self-face recognition (Tsakiris, 2008).”
Illusory ownership of a virtual child body causes overestimation of object sizes and implicit attitude changes (2013, result): “This result is not surprising and is in line with earlier results that it is possible to generate such illusions with different body forms (15, 19, 21, 23), including very small or large bodies (22).”
Why and how to use virtual reality to study human social interaction: The challenges of exploring a new research landscape (2018, methodology): “…same principles can be applied in VR, using an HMD and a live-feed video from a mannequin being synchronously stroked as the participant’s own body (Petkova & Ehrsson, 2008), or a virtual arm being synchronously stroked as the participant’s own arm (Slater, PerezMarcos, Ehrsson,& Sanchez-Vives,…”
Merging second-person and first-person neuroscience (2013, neutral): “Names of the authors of the target article: Leonhard Schilbach, Bert Timmermans, Vasudevi Reddy, Alan Costall, Gary Bente, Tobias Schlicht, Kai Vogeley Word counts: abstract (60 words), main text (845 words), references (399 words), entire text (1430 words) Commentary title: - -”
An Interoceptive Predictive Coding Model of Conscious Presence (2011, background): “Several recent studies have used VR to generalize the rubber-hand illusion to induce experiences of heautoscopy (Petkova and Ehrsson, 2008; Blanke and Metzinger, 2009) and body transfer into a VE (Slater et al., 2010b) [Heautoscopy is intermediate between autoscopy and full-blown out of body…”
The building blocks of the full body ownership illusion (2013, methodology): “…studies, we further need to address the following question: why other studies in which the physical and virtual bodies were highly spatially coincident (Petkova and Ehrsson, 2008; Petkova et al., 2011) found synchronous visuotactile stimulation to be necessary for the full body ownership illusion?”
MSc Thesis (2011, background): “It has been shown that virtual reality body illusions with high telepresence are strong enough to experience an entire mannequin’s body as one’s own [6].”
Virtual Embodiment of White People in a Black Virtual Body Leads to a Sustained Reduction in Their Implicit Racial Bias (2016, methodology): “For example, Petkova and Ehrsson (2008) used video cameras mounted on the head of a manikin looking down toward its body, but fed the video stream via a head-mounted display to participants.”
The role of interaction in virtual embodiment: Effects of the virtual hand representation (2016, background): “For example, controlling the level of realism of the avatar [23], its skin color [22] or even its shape [26].”
The Sense of Embodiment in Virtual Reality (2012, methodology): “Physiological responses to threat; for example, SCR (Armel & Ramachandran, 2003; Honma, Koyama, & Osada, 2009; Petkova & Ehrsson, 2008; Petkova et al., 2011; Yuan & Steed, 2010), Heart Rate Deceleration (Slater, Spanlang, Sanchez-Vives, et al., 2010).”
First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality (2010, methodology): “There is also evidence that ownership can be attributed to a manikin that appears visually to substitute the person's real body as seen through head-mounted displays coupled to a video camera oriented down at the manikin body [14].”