The plasticity of the bodily self: how function and age shape the acceptance of virtual bodies.

Our body structures our psychological experience. Recent work suggests that the sense of bodily self is flexible. This is especially apparent in children, whose bodies are growing and sensory systems changing. What shapes own-body representation, and how flexible is it? This can be answered using new virtual reality approaches where we control a moving virtual body, seen from a first-person perspective.
These virtual bodies may be functionally different to one's own - able to reach further, fit through narrow spaces, or even fly. By measuring how changes to the virtual body's function impact upon body ownership and control, we can both reveal the factors which shape own-body representation and help develop this important new technology. In this grant we will study the role of virtual body function in how we understand our own bodies and accept new virtual bodies. Further, we test whether children show increased aptitude for learning to own and control new bodies. We finally bridge this work to education, testing the applied benefits of such virtual experiences in a classroom setting. This wide-ranging project, addressing fundamental questions about the bodily self, spans sensory, motor, cognitive and developmental Psychology, as well as Computer Science. We expect it to be of interest to a correspondingly broad academic audience, with results disseminated in international conferences and high quality academic journals.
Across a series of studies, we will test whether adults and children can accept a virtual body whose function is different to their own (e.g. a hand which reaches further than their own; a body which allows them to squeeze through narrow gaps). These functions will be carefully developed by our Computer Science team; their impacts upon body ownership and control will be rigorously experimentally tested by our Psychology team. We will examine the two important and complementary contexts of manual (hand) control and whole-body control. Using a wide variety of measures including self-report, psychophysiology, and motion capture, we will measure how well users can learn both to control functionally augmented virtual bodies, and to feel a sense of ownership over them. We will examine how users can be trained to accept a virtual body as their own, both over a single experimental session and over a longer period of a week. By testing across age groups, we will test the prediction that there is substantial plasticity in own-body presentation in children compared to adults, which widens the range of virtual bodies they can learn to own and control. In a final study, we will examine the educational benefits of the functionally-enhanced bodies we develop, testing whether they produce specific learning gains for spatial information in schoolchildren.
The project is a unique cross-disciplinary effort, incorporating theoretical and technical expertise to produce cutting-edge work. PI Dr Cowie (Durham Psychology), is a Psychologist who has pioneered experimental studies of children's body representation and motor development. Co-I's Dr Gillies and Dr Pan (Goldsmiths Computer Science) are experts on embodied virtual reality. A User group including individuals from academia (e.g. Prof. Mel Slater) and industry (e.g. staff in BBC; Microsoft Research) will ensure that the project has maximum societal and economic impact.
Social and economic impact is an important seam running through the project. Our educational experiment examines whether VR can specifically help schoolchildren to learn spatial information, a core STEM skill. This work provides a platform for future developments of this technology for education and skill training. Through our User Group of VR experts from academia and industry (e.g. BBC, Microsoft), we will communicate our work to the VR developer audience, providing principles for designing virtual reality games which maximise the potential of embodied virtual reality in user groups of all ages.