A Research On The Mechanism Of The Interaction Of Interoceptive And Exteroceptive Information Of The Full Body Illusion

The full body illusion paradigm is one of the commonly used paradigms in the study of body representation.This paradigm could be divided into the out of body experience and the body illusion from the first-person perspective.The former refered to participants experiencing as if they were leaving their body and observing their body from a position outside the body.The latter refered to the fact that the participants could see the virtual body from the position where they should see their real body by lowering their heads,and believed that the body belongs to them.Researchers found that compared to asynchronous conditions,through the integration of synchronous multi-sensory stimuli information from self and virtual body,the matching of synchronous visual,kinesthetic,tactile,and physical sensory information would cause participants to experience owning the virtual body.The feeling of owning the virtual body,that was,the sense of body ownership.In addition to paying attention to the multi-sensory stimuli information from the outside of the body,the information received by the individual from the inside of the body was also crucial to the perception of the strength of the body illusion.Previous studies had mostly used heartbeat perception ability as a measure of individual perception of differences in information from the body.Heartbeat tracking tasks have also been widely used due to its simple and easy-to-operate characteristics.The experimental results of some researchers using rubber hand illusion and enfacement illusion showed that participants with low interoception exhibited a stronger illusion of embodiedness.However,in view of the fact that there had not been a study that used heartbeat perception as a measurement index of individual interoception and used the full body illusion experiment paradigm to examine the interaction of interoception and external multi-sensory stimuli.Therefore,this article believed that it was necessary to explore the interaction mechanism of the two in the body illusion in order to understand the essence of body self-consciousness,and further broadened the relevant thinking about the practical application of the body illusion paradigm.Therefore,this study used the heartbeat tracking method to measure the interoception of the individual,and at the same time,realized the control of the full body illusion by manipulating the synchronization of the multi-sensory stimuli information from the outside of the body in the immersive virtual reality environment,trying to examine the mechanism of internal and external perception information in the full body illusion.Experiment 1(N=64)used the classic visual-tactile stimuli paradigm of the full body illusion,trying to explore the individual differences in the interoception of the full body illusion under the classical visual-tactile stimulation conditions.In this experiment,a 2×2 repeated measures analysis of variance was used to evaluate the interaction between interoception and the synchronization of visual-tactile stimuli in the full body illusion.The results showed that synchronicity is essential as a critical factor for the production of illusions throughout the body.However,it was only found in the self-location perception questionnaire that subjects with lower interoception scored higher on the questionnaire under synchronized conditions.Experiment 2(N=62)used the classic visual-kinesthetic stimuli paradigm of the full body illusion,trying to explore the individual differences in the interoception of the full body illusion under the classic visual-kinesthetic stimulation condition.In this experiment,a 2×2 repeated measures analysis of variance was used to evaluate the interaction between interoception and the synchronization of visual-kinesthetic stimuli in the full body illusion.The results showed that synchronicity was very important as a critical factor for the generation of the full body illusion,and participants with higher a critical factor showed a more proprioceptive deviation towards the virtual body.Experiment 3(N=62)included both visual-tactile stimuli and visual-kinesthetic stimuli in an attempt to explore the interaction between it and internal receptivity in the illusion of the full body.In this experiment,a 2×2×2 repeated measures analysis of variance was used to evaluate the interaction between interoception,multi-sensory stimulation types and synchronization of multi-sensory stimulation in the full body illusion.The results showed that subjective body ownership under synchronous conditions was significantly higher than the subjective embodied feeling questionnaire under asynchronous conditions,and the proprioception shift of participants with high interoception under synchronous conditions are significantly higher than under asynchronous conditions.Experiment 4(N=58)incorporated visual-tactile-kinesthetic stimuli into the full body illusion from the first-person perspective to examine whether the full body illusion from the first-person perspective was easier to detect the interaction between he proprioception shift and external multisensory stimuli.The operation of the first-person perspective was to add a virtual mirror to the experiment so that the participant could observe their virtual body through the virtual mirror,and the participant could also experience the illusion by looking down at their body.This experiment used 2×2 repeated measures analysis of variance to explore the interaction between the interoception and the synchronization of visual-tactile-kinesthetic stimuli in the full body illusion from the first person perspective.The results showed that in the full body illusion from the first-person perspective,the main effect of stimulus synchronization was still significant,but we had not found the interaction between synchronization and interoception.In summary,the experimental results of this study indicated that interoception may indeed have a certain modulating effect on the illusion experience of the whole body.Specifically,subjects with higher interoception showed a more proprioceptive drift toward the virtual body,and subjects with lower interoception showed higher scores on the subjective self-location perception questionnaire.This research further revealed the interaction between the two in the body illusion from the perspective of internal and external perception information,expanded the connotation and extension of the research on the body illusion,and also provided some thinking for future research.