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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognitive Science
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1399218
This article is part of the Research Topic Self-Concept Plasticity: Behavioral and Neural Evidence View all 5 articles

The Manipulation of Top-down Interpretation as One's Symptomatic Body Reduces the Sense of Body Ownership

Provisionally accepted
Kazuki Yamamoto Kazuki Yamamoto 1,2*Takashi Nakao Takashi Nakao 1
  • 1 Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University, Higashihiroshima, Japan
  • 2 Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Tokyo, Japan

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Sense of body ownership has been studied using rubber hand illusion (RHI) and full-body illusion (FBI). It has recently become clear that consciously interpreting a fake body as one's own in a topdown manner influences these body illusions. Furthermore, a study interestingly found that the influence of top-down interpretation was moderated by the degree of depersonalization, which was a symptom of a lack of sense of body ownership. In a case study on depersonalization, the top-down interpretation of one's body was suggested to be a negative physical state that made it difficult to feel a sense of body ownership. However, this has not been examined. We examined the influence of negative top-down interpretation using an FBI procedure. A fake body was instructed to be viewed as a negative self-body ("view the virtual body's back while regarding the virtual body as your own experiencing abdominal pain"). To examine the influence of a negative top-down interpretation, participants were instructed to interpret the body as their own (neutral self-body) as a control condition. We used skin conductance responses to a fearful stimulus presented after an illusion procedure to measure the degree of FBI experienced. Results indicated a significant difference in the skin conductance response between the synchronous and asynchronous presentation of visual-tactile stimuli in the control condition, which confirmed the occurrence of the illusion. However, the occurrence of the illusion was not confirmed when the participants were instructed to interpret the virtual body as their own in a negative physical state, and the degree of FBI was smaller than the control condition. Our finding that an FBI was inhibited by manipulation of the top-down interpretation suggested that it could be a factor that inhibited the creation of a sense of body ownership.

    Keywords: Sense of body ownership, Full-body illusion, top-down interpretation, Depersonalization, Skin conductance response

    Received: 11 Mar 2024; Accepted: 09 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Yamamoto and Nakao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Kazuki Yamamoto, Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University, Higashihiroshima, Japan

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