Imperceptible body transformation in virtual reality: Saliency of self representation

Gizem Senel; Francisco Macia-Varela; Jaime Gallego; Hatice Pehlivan Jensen; Kasper Hornbæk; Mel Slater

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2023.107938

Imperceptible body transformation in virtual reality: Saliency of self representation

iScience. 2023 Sep 15;26(10):107938. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.107938. eCollection 2023 Oct 20.

Authors

Gizem Senel^{1

2}, Francisco Macia-Varela¹, Jaime Gallego¹, Hatice Pehlivan Jensen³, Kasper Hornbæk³, Mel Slater^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Event Lab, Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
² Institute of Neurosciences of the University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
³ Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Abstract

Change blindness (CB) is the perceptual phenomenon whereby people are blind to dramatic changes in their visual environment. In virtual reality (VR) a person's body can be substituted by a life-sized virtual one that moves synchronously with their real body movements as their self-representation. We consider whether CB occurs in VR, and whether there are differences in the case of changes to their own virtual body compared with the body of another. Forty people took part in a Qi Gong lesson in VR led by a virtual instructor. During the lesson both their own and the instructor's face dramatically changed in appearance. Overall, 73% and 85% did not notice the changes to their own and instructor's face respectively. People make iconic inferences about their visual surroundings without sampling detail, and reduced CB in the case of their own body may be a marker for self-representation.

Keywords: Applied sciences; Social sciences.