Video ergo sum: manipulating bodily self-consciousness.
Humans normally experience the conscious self as localized within their bodily borders. This spatial unity may break down in certain neurological conditions such as out-of-body experiences, leading to a striking disturbance of bodily self-consciousness. On the basis of these clinical data, we designed an experiment that uses conflicting visual-somatosensory input in virtual reality to disrupt the spatial unity between the self and the body. We found that during multisensory conflict, participants felt as if a virtual body seen in front of them was their own body and mislocalized themselves toward the virtual body, to a position outside their bodily borders. Our results indicate that spatial unity and bodily self-consciousness can be studied experimentally and are based on multisensory and cognitive processing of bodily information.
Lenggenhager
Bigna
B
Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Station 15, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
Tadi
Tej
T
Metzinger
Thomas
T
Blanke
Olaf
O
D000328:Adult; D001828:Body Image; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007088:Illusions; D008297:Male; D010469:Perceptual Distortion; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014110:Touch