Social exclusion reduces people's sense of agency and ownership over a virtual hand. In a virtual hand illusion experiment, participants who were excluded during a Cyberball game reported weaker feelings of ownership and agency and showed reduced physiological and behavioral measures of these experiences compared to included participants. Synchrony between the virtual hand and the participant's own hand strengthened both ownership and agency across all measures, but this effect was weaker for excluded individuals. The findings indicate that social context shapes fundamental aspects of self-perception.
The authors defend their proposal that natural selection favors nonveridical perceptions tuned to fitness, contrary to the textbook view that perception is normally veridical. They thank commentators who offered counterarguments and those who suggested ways to test and develop the idea, responding to each in alphabetical order. The exchange aims to advance scientific understanding of perception and its evolution.
Continuous flash suppression (CFS) is a technique used to study conscious and nonconscious perception, but key questions remain about how it suppresses visual information and what level of visual processing can occur without awareness. This review evaluates how different experimental setups and methods for assessing consciousness affect results in CFS studies. Evidence indicates that low-level visual information can survive suppression and be processed nonconsciously, while high-level visual recognition is completely impaired under CFS. The authors conclude there is no evidence for nonconscious high-level recognition with this technique.