title: Owning an overweight or underweight body: distinguishing the physical, experienced and virtual body.
abstract: Our bodies are the most intimately familiar objects we encounter in our perceptual environment. Virtual reality provides a unique method to allow us to experience having a very different body from our own, thereby providing a valuable method to explore the plasticity of body representation. In this paper, we show that women can experience ownership over a whole virtual body that is considerably smaller or larger than their physical body. In order to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying body ownership, we use an embodiment questionnaire, and introduce two new behavioral response measures: an affordance estimation task (indirect measure of body size) and a body size estimation task (direct measure of body size). Interestingly, after viewing the virtual body from first person perspective, both the affordance and the body size estimation tasks indicate a change in the perception of the size of the participant's experienced body. The change is biased by the size of the virtual body (overweight or underweight). Another novel aspect of our study is that we distinguish between the physical, experienced and virtual bodies, by asking participants to provide affordance and body size estimations for each of the three bodies separately. This methodological point is important for virtual reality experiments investigating body ownership of a virtual body, because it offers a better understanding of which cues (e.g. visual, proprioceptive, memory, or a combination thereof) influence body perception, and whether the impact of these cues can vary between different setups.
authors.affiliation: Department of Human Perception, Cognition and Action, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany; Department of Philosophy of Neuroscience, Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Ivelina V
authors.initials: IV
authors.lastname: Piryankova
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy of Neuroscience, Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Hong Yu
authors.initials: HY
authors.lastname: Wong
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, England.
authors.forename: Sally A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Linkenauger
authors.affiliation: Department of Human Perception, Cognition and Action, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany; Department of Philosophy of Neuroscience, Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Catherine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Stinson
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, London, England.
authors.forename: Matthew R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Longo
authors.affiliation: Department of Human Perception, Cognition and Action, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany; Department of Brain and Cognitive Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, Korea.
authors.forename: Heinrich H
authors.initials: HH
authors.lastname: Bülthoff
authors.affiliation: Department of Human Perception, Cognition and Action, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Betty J
authors.initials: BJ
authors.lastname: Mohler
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001828:Body Image / Q000523:psychology*; D049628:Body Size; D003198:Computer Simulation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D050177:Overweight / Q000523:psychology*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013851:Thinness / Q000523:psychology*; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult
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