Ricerc@Sapienza

Recent theories posit that physiological signals contribute to corporeal awareness - the basic feeling that one has a body (body ownership) which acts according to one's will (body agency) and occupies a specific position (body location). Combining physiological recordings with immersive virtual reality, we found that an ecological mapping of real respiratory patterns onto a virtual body illusorily changes corporeal awareness.

Research on virtual reality (VR) has gained momentum over the last fifteen years or so. In their review, Pan and Hamilton (2018, British Journal of Psychology) show how the different types of VR devices have the potential to probe fundamental psychological constructs, like those underlying social interactions. Expanding on their work, we propose a research agenda to increase the sense of co-presence and make VR more real than reality through bodily illusions, multisensory stimulation, self-conscious emotions, and multisubject social cognition.