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

Summary

Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) significantly hinge on the synchronization of visual and tactile stimuli. In a study with 120 participants, those experiencing visuomotor synchrony reported stronger feelings of ownership over a virtual body compared to visuotactile conditions. Interestingly, individuals with low interoceptive accuracy (IA) showed enhanced embodiment in visuotactile scenarios, while those with high IA felt more connected during visuomotor tasks. This suggests that our sense of self-location and ownership is intricately tied to how we process bodily sensations and movements.

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.

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