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Imagined own-body transformations during passive self-motion

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Abstract

Spatial perspective taking is a crucial social skill that underlies many of our everyday interactions. Previous studies have suggested that spatial perspective taking is an embodied process that involves the integration of both motor and proprioceptive information. Given the importance of vestibular signals for own-body perception, mental own-body imagery, and bodily self-consciousness, in the present study we hypothesized that vestibular stimulation due to passive own-body displacements should also modulate spatial perspective taking. Participants performed an own-body transformation task while being passively rotated in a clockwise or counter-clockwise direction on a human motion platform. A congruency effect was observed, reflected in faster reaction times if the implied mental body rotation direction matched the actual rotation direction of the chair. These findings indicate that vestibular stimulation modulates and facilitates mental perspective taking, thereby highlighting the importance of integrating multisensory bodily information for spatial perspective taking.

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Notes

  1. As different processes are involved in mental body transformations (Gardner & Potts, 2011; May & Wendt, 2012) and subjects often report different strategies (Kessler & Wang, 2012) we have decided in this manuscript to use the term "mental body transformation" instead of own body transformation.

  2. Post hoc tests did not reveal significant differences between stimuli implying a CW vs. a CCW rotation (t(17) = 1.4, p = 0.18 for CW chair rotations, t(17) = −1.6, p = 0.14 for CCW chair rotations), indicating that although rotation direction did affect mental transformation, it did not result in a complete reversal of the directionality effects. This could be partly related to the fact of spatial compatibility effects partly underlying the MBT task (Gardner & Potts, 2011; May & Wendt, 2012) and strategy differences between participants (i.e., egocentric vs. allocentric strategy; see also below).

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Acknowledgments

The present study was supported by a Marie Curie Grant (IEF grant 252713), the Virtual Embodiment and Robotic Re-Embodiment grant within the European FP7 framework (VERE grant 257695) and the Swiss Science Foundation (SINERGIA CRSII1-125135/1).

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Correspondence to Michiel van Elk.

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van Elk, M., Blanke, O. Imagined own-body transformations during passive self-motion. Psychological Research 78, 18–27 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-013-0486-8

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