The building blocks of the full body ownership illusion

By Antonella Maselli, Mel Slater. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2013

596 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Previous work has reported that it is not difficult to give people the illusion of ownership over an artificial body, providing a powerful tool for the investigation of the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying body perception and self consciousness. We present an experimental study that uses immersive virtual reality (IVR) focused on identifying the perceptual building blocks of this illusion. We systematically manipulated visuotactile and visual sensorimotor contingencies, visual perspective, and the appearance of the virtual body in order to assess their relative role and mutual interaction. Consistent results from subjective reports and physiological measures showed that a first person perspective over a fake humanoid body is essential for eliciting a body ownership illusion. We found that the illusion of ownership can be generated when the virtual body has a realistic skin tone and spatially substitutes the real body seen from a first person perspective. In this case there is no need for an additional contribution of congruent visuotactile or sensorimotor cues. Additionally, we found that the processing of incongruent perceptual cues can be modulated by the level of the illusion: when the illusion is strong, incongruent cues are not experienced as incorrect. Participants exposed to asynchronous visuotactile stimulation can experience the ownership illusion and perceive touch as originating from an object seen to contact the virtual body. Analogously, when the level of realism of the virtual body is not high enough and/or when there is no spatial overlap between the two bodies, then the contribution of congruent multisensory and/or sensorimotor cues is required for evoking the illusion. On the basis of these results and inspired by findings from neurophysiological recordings in the monkey, we propose a model that accounts for many of the results reported in the literature.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/af81f48077a66931c271f3e497114cbf26424a99

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Citations in the corpus

Putting yourself in the skin of a black avatar reduces implicit racial bias. (2013, background): “Provided that there is no body movement this is enough to generate this illusion (Maselli & Slater, 2013).”
Virtual Embodiment of White People in a Black Virtual Body Leads to a Sustained Reduction in Their Implicit Racial Bias (2016, result): “These two results are discussed by Maselli and Slater (2013), where it was found that 1PP was dominant, and the discrepancy between the two studies might be accounted for by the plastic look of the manikin in the first study, and the more realistic appearance of the virtual body in the second…”
Enhancing Our Lives with Immersive Virtual Reality (2016, methodology): “…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 and Slater, 2013, 2014; Pomes and Slater, 2013; Blom et al., 2014; Kokkinara and Slater, 2014) and exploring the effects of distortions…”
The Impact of Avatar Personalization and Immersion on Virtual Body Ownership, Presence, and Emotional Response (2018, background): “Second, advances in capturing high quality 3D individualized human bodies by using photogrammetry methods [1, 16] enables a closer look into the impact of realism and personalized avatars as motivated by recent work [23– 25,28–30].”
Real Virtuality: A Code of Ethical Conduct. Recommendations for Good Scientific Practice and the Consumers of VR-Technology (2016, background): “In more recent work, Maselli and Slater (2013) have found that tactile feedback is not required for an illusion of embodiment.”
Avatar Embodiment. Towards a Standardized Questionnaire (2018, background): “More importantly several experiments have shown correlations between questionnaires and physiological and behavioral responses (Maselli and Slater, 2013; González-Franco et al., 2014) thus supporting the relevance of questionnaires.”