Interoception, alexithymia, and motor congruency: Psychological drivers of body ownership in virtual reality.
Perception May 13, 2026 Sarune Savickaite, Mitra Gupta, Dharshini Kannan
People with alexithymia, a trait involving difficulty identifying and describing emotions, tend to have poorer interoception—the ability to perceive internal bodily signals. Interoception helps form a coherent sense of self and contributes to body ownership, the feeling that one's body belongs to oneself. In an immersive virtual reality experiment, motor synchrony between virtual and physical movements increased body ownership. Alexithymia was negatively related to interoceptive accuracy, and interoceptive accuracy showed a trend-level positive association with body ownership when movements were aligned. Due to a modest sample size of 26 and reliance on a single cardiac measure, these preliminary results need replication.