Journal reference: PloS One, DOI: 10.1371/, Should We See It From The Side or the Bottomĭir: Akiyuki Shinbo, Nobuyuki Takeuchi. Social neuroscientist Liane Young at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says that knowing that people transfer themselves into avatars could be used to answer many questions in psychology. Making ourselves fatter or slimmer could also have “profound implications” on our psychology and behaviour, says Slater, which could be used to develop therapies for people with body-image problems.Īlexander Mussap of Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, who has studied the rubber hand illusion in the context of eating disorders, says the new research further demonstrates that “our sense of self is surprisingly malleable”.

Meanwhile, previous studies found that giving people virtual-reality avatars that are taller or shorter than they are alters the way they behave.

People considering a sex change have used the virtual world of Second Life to test what it is like to have a different gender. The findings might be applied to entertainment – to make video games more immersive, for example – but also to psychology. He suggests that the familiarity of looking down and seeing our own body “is so overwhelming” that even dramatic changes in body won’t override the influence of vision. The experiment demonstrates the strong connection the volunteers felt to their new, virtual bodies, says Slater. These changes in heart rate did not occur when the same men did a second experiment that was identical, except they viewed the whole scene from the third-person point of view. Slater emphasises that this was surprising, given that the men were looking down on the girl, from a third-person perspective, by this point.

Stranger still, as the girl was slapped, the men’s heart rate changed in ways that were similar to, although not as great as, those recorded when people feel threatened. On average, the men reported medium-strength feelings about the girl’s body being their own, and strong feelings that the woman was touching their body. Immediately afterwards, the men were asked to rate how strongly they felt that the girl’s body was theirs. They now saw the girl being slapped by the virtual woman. They also saw a virtual woman approaching them and stroking their virtual girl’s arm, while in the real world unseen experimenters touched the men’s flesh-and-blood arm.Īfter this preparation, the virtual visual angle of the men’s headsets changed, and the volunteers found themselves looking down on their avatars. When the volunteers looked down, in place of their own body they saw that of a 10-year-old girl in a tartan skirt. To see if the virtual world could be used to induce a similar illusion, Slater’s team gave 24 men a head-tracking video display to wear and recorded their heart rates.

Body swap anime