Inducing Illusory Ownership of a Virtual Body

By Mel Slater, Daniel Pérez-Marcos, H. Ehrsson, Maria V. Sanchez-Vives. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2009

615 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We discuss three experiments that investigate how virtual limbs and bodies can come to feel like real limbs and bodies. The first experiment shows that an illusion of ownership of a virtual arm appearing to project out of a person's shoulder can be produced by tactile stimulation on a person's hidden real hand and synchronous stimulation on the seen virtual hand. The second shows that the illusion can be produced by synchronous movement of the person's hidden real hand and a virtual hand. The third shows that a weaker form of the illusion can be produced when a brain–computer interface is employed to move the virtual hand by means of motor imagery without any tactile stimulation. We discuss related studies that indicate that the ownership illusion may be generated for an entire body. This has important implications for the scientific understanding of body ownership and several practical applications.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/51f8241e5053738a2f0842638ba4bebfec1f25f1

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Citations in the corpus

First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality (2010, background): “While the vast majority of work in this field has shown that it is possible to incorporate physical objects or video images of these into the body representation, it has also recently been shown that the same methods work with entirely virtual objects [11], [12], [13].”
Avatar Embodiment. Towards a Standardized Questionnaire (2018, background): “Several studies have shown that using embodied avatars can lead to increases of the subjective sense of presence inside VR, increasing both the place illusion and the plausibility of the experience (Slater, 2009; Slater et al., 2010a).”
MSc Thesis (2011, result): “Telepresence from virtual reality is also used in VR body illusions, for which it is seen as a prerequisite for embodiment [5].”
Why and how to use virtual reality to study human social interaction: The challenges of exploring a new research landscape (2018, background): “This includes changing the spatial location of the body (Slater et al., 2009), the age of the body (Banakou, Groten, & Slater, 2013), and the race of the body (Peck, Seinfeld, Aglioti, & Slater, 2013).”
The Sense of Embodiment in Virtual Reality (2012, methodology): “Future studies should correlate both qualitative and quantitative data in order to get a fuller picture of their association with the subcomponents of embodiment (e.g., Ehrsson, 2007; Slater et al., 2008; Slater, Spanlang, Sanchez-Vives, et al., 2010).”
Illusory ownership of a virtual child body causes overestimation of object sizes and implicit attitude changes (2013, background): “The issue of how the brain represents the body has been approached extensively in philosophy (1, 2), cognitive neuroscience (3–5), robotics (6, 7), and virtual environments (8, 9).”
Enhancing Our Lives with Immersive Virtual Reality (2016, background): “…work on building virtual embodiment technology (Spanlang et al., 2013, 2014), studying the conditions that can lead to such body ownership illusions (Slater et al., 2008, 2009, 2010b; Sanchez-Vives et al., 2010; Borland et al., 2013; González-Franco et al., 2013; Llobera et al., 2013; Maselli…”
Presence and Cybersickness in Virtual Reality Are Negatively Related: A Review (2019, background): “…capability of action within a virtual environment has frequently been linked to the feeling of presence in VR (e.g., Sanchez-Vives and Slater, 2005; Slater, 2009), and in line with this idea there is evidence that controlling one’s own locomotion in a virtual landscape increases presence (Stanney…”
Transforming Experience: The Potential of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality for Enhancing Personal and Clinical Change (2016, background): “Using VR, different authors induced the illusion of a fake hand (146) or a fake limb (147) and produced an out-of-body experience (137) by modifying the normal association between touch and vision.”
Immersive Journalism: Immersive Virtual Reality for the First-Person Experience of News (2010, background): “Then the plausibility, the sensation that something is real, that it is actually what it is represented to be, was lost, and as a result your behavior changed (Slater et al., 2009).”
Understanding the neural bases of bodily self-consciousness: recent achievements and main challenges (2023, methodology): “Two widely used and popular experimental paradigms in cognitive neuroscience were the “rubber hand illusion” (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998) and the “full-body illusion” (Ehrsson et al., 2004; Lenggenhager et al., 2007; Slater et al., 2009), developed to manipulate illusory self-identification with a fa”