Virtual reality may alter perception of self
According to research that uses immersive VR technology to produce a body swap illusion among participants, they discovered that heterosexual individuals find intimate touch from a same-sex virtual avatar to be more pleasant when they chose a virtual body of the opposing sex.
Virtual reality environments have been shown to create a body swap illusion, in which a person perceives their virtual avatar as their actual body. The new findings, which were published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, report how touch perceptions are affected when a person’s physical body is replaced with a virtual one.
“My research focuses on the embodied nature of social touch. The embodied cognition account postulates that cognition and emotion are shaped by the many kinds of experiences that come from having a body”, said study author Manuel Mello, a Ph.D. student at the Sapienza University of Rome.
“That touch experiences depend upon our sex (and gender) is a well-known fact. But how about the link between sex, the body, and social touch preferences? No study had yet investigated how social touch is affected by perceiving our body as completely different from what we usually experience in terms of sexual characteristics. Virtual reality and the full-body illusion enabled us to test exactly this, and the result is what you see in the published article”.
Manuel Mello, Martina Fusaro, Gaetano Tieri, and Salvatore Maria Aglioti investigated the behavioral and physiological effects of embodying a same-sex or opposite-sex virtual body in a study that included 21 healthy heterosexual women and 21 healthy heterosexual men.
Participants in the study sat on a chair while wearing an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. They watched while a male or female virtual avatar caressed their foot, knee, pelvis, chest, head, and hand from a first-person position. But the volunteers were not touched in any way and the caresses were exclusively given to the virtual bodies of the individuals.
“In our work, the touches were virtual”, Mello explained. “We wanted to investigate the power of virtual reality in eliciting coherent behavioral and physiological reactions to interpersonal touch ‘as if’ the touch were delivered on our own body. This opens several paths to explore the interplay between body ownership and social touch in virtual reality. Moreover, we also focused on intimate touch, which would be unethical in normal circumstances”.
Both women and men liked to be touched by avatars of the opposite gender. However, Mello and his colleagues discovered that impersonating a virtual body of the opposite gender changed the participants’ experience of virtual touching. When women embodied a male avatar, they found caresses on intimate body areas from a female avatar to be more pleasant and erogenous than when they embodied a female avatar, while men found caresses on intimate body areas from a female avatar to be more pleasant and erogenous when they embodied a female avatar (compared to when they embodied a male).
Significantly, these preferences changes, along with those in skin conductance response and heart rate were linked to feelings of bodily ownership, especially among men.
“I think there is one main take-home message in our work”, Mello said. “Unlike Descartes used to claim, res cogitans (the mind) and res extensa (the brain, the body) are two sides of the same coin. Mind, brain, and body constantly interact in our perception and understanding of the outer and inner worlds”.
“We demonstrated that this is also true for social touch perception, as changing the body changed social touch preferences, and these changes were further predicted by specific physiological activity”.
Men were also shown to be more susceptible to sex-related body swap illusions, according to the researchers. When embodying an opposite-sex virtual body, male participants reported greater sensations of body ownership, comfort, and identity than their female counterparts.
For both male and female avatars, possessing a male virtual body tended to reduce the illusion of being touched for caresses given. Embedding a female virtual body, on the other hand, increased the illusion of being touched for caresses performed by a male avatar.
However, Mello pointed out that the current study only looked at heterosexuals. “Future studies may want to examine the same link between sex, body, and social touch preferences in other sexual orientations”, he said.
The question of perception is another matter of debate in this increasingly technological world. We not only have to contend with the illusion of other people’s identities (see deepfakes) but also with a new perception of ourselves where the metaverse will inevitably lead us to. While all of this might lead us to new deceptions, it may also give us a better understanding of the different deceptions of the society itself.
Source psypost.org
