The impact of interoceptive accuracy and stimulation type on the out-of-body experience

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

People tend to perceive a virtual body standing in front of them as their own if it is either stroked or moving synchronously with their own real body—the out-of-body experience (OBE). We combined synchrony manipulation with two other factors of theoretical interest: the kind of stimulation, visuotactile stimuli or visuomotor correlations, being synchronised and the interoceptive accuracy (IA) of participants, assessed by means of the heartbeat counting task. Results showed that explicit measures of embodiment were systematically affected by synchrony, and this synchrony effect was more pronounced for visuomotor than for visuotactile conditions. The walking drift was affected by IA: In visuotactile conditions, the synchrony effect was pronounced in individuals with low IA, presumably reflecting a stronger impact of the visual information. In visuomotor conditions, however, the synchrony effect was stronger in individuals with high IA, presumably reflecting a stronger impact of re-afferent information generated by the participants’ own movements.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1940-1952
Number of pages13
JournalQuarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Volume76
Issue number8
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2023
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

PubMed 36113171
ORCID /0000-0003-4731-5125/work/151979880

Keywords

Keywords

  • interoceptive accuracy, out-of-body experiences, self-location, Sense of ownership