Out-of-body illusion induced by visual-vestibular stimulation

Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are characterized by the subjective feeling of being located outside one's physical body and perceiving one's own body from an elevated perspective looking downwards. OBEs have been correlated with abnormal integration of bodily signals, including visual and vestibular information. In two studies, we used mixed reality combined with a motion platform to manipulate visual and vestibular integration in healthy participants. Behavioral data and questionnaires show that congruent visual-vestibular stimulation in a self-centered reference frame induced an OBE-like illusion characterized by elevated self-location and feelings of disembodiment and lightness. The OBE-like illusion was also modulated by individuals' visual field dependency assessed by the Rod and Frame Test. These results show that the manipulation of visual-vestibular stimulation in the present study induces various aspects of OBEs and further link OBE to congruency mechanisms between visual and vestibular gravitational and self-motion cues.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Olaf Blanke, Bruno Herbelin, Florian Lance, Hsin-Ping Wu, Sophie Jacqueline Andrée Betka, Estelle Nakul
2023
Journal paper

Abstract

Official source

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/309767?ln=en

About this result

Related concepts (36)

Related publications (50)

Out-of-body experience

An out-of-body experience (OBE or sometimes OOBE) is a phenomenon in which a person perceives the world from a location outside their physical body. An OBE is a form of autoscopy (literally "seeing self"), although this term is more commonly used to refer to the pathological condition of seeing a second self, or doppelgänger. The term out-of-body experience was introduced in 1943 by G. N. M. Tyrrell in his book Apparitions, and was adopted by researchers such as Celia Green, and Robert Monroe, as an alternative to belief-centric labels such as "astral projection" or "spirit walking".

Optical illusion

In visual perception, an optical illusion (also called a visual illusion) is an illusion caused by the visual system and characterized by a visual percept that arguably appears to differ from reality. Illusions come in a wide variety; their categorization is difficult because the underlying cause is often not clear but a classification proposed by Richard Gregory is useful as an orientation. According to that, there are three main classes: physical, physiological, and cognitive illusions, and in each class there are four kinds: Ambiguities, distortions, paradoxes, and fictions.

Motion simulator

A motion simulator or motion platform is a mechanism that creates the feelings of being in a real motion environment. In a simulator, the movement is synchronised with a visual display of the outside world (OTW) scene. Motion platforms can provide movement in all of the six degrees of freedom (DOF) that can be experienced by an object that is free to move, such as an aircraft or spacecraft:. These are the three rotational degrees of freedom (roll, pitch, yaw) and three translational or linear degrees of freedom (surge, heave, sway).

A Stand-Alone Augmented Reality Intervention for Chronic Pain using Embodied Systolic Stimulation

Andrea Serino, Robert Leeb, Oliver Alan Kannape, Skander Mensi, Sylvain Cardin, Fabien Bourban, Alexis Dorier

Chronic pain presents a tremendous personal, societal, and financial burden. Treatment options are often limited to managing symptoms as opposed to treating the causes, and the consequences of pharmacological treatments can be immensely harmful as evidence ...

IEEE2023

Imagine the Unseen World: A Benchmark for Systematic Generalization in Visual World Models

Caglar Gulcehre

Systematic compositionality, or the ability to adapt to novel situations by creating a mental model of the world using reusable pieces of knowledge, remains a significant challenge in machine learning. While there has been considerable progress in the lang ...

2023

Common factors are omnipresent in everyday life, e.g., people who do well in one cognitive test are likely to perform well in other cognitive tests as well, and vice versa. In vision, however, there seems to be a multitude of specific factors rather than a ...

EPFL2021