24/06/19
Speaker: Manuel Mello
The sense of touch is considered one of the many important facets constituting the world of social interactions. The affective component of touch ranges from extreme unpleasantness (pain, disgust) to extreme pleasantness (erotic, consolation feelings) and may largely shape our interpersonal behaviour. A new class of unmyelinated C-tactile (CT) afferent fibres, located on hairy but not glabrous skin, has been discovered that responds to slow gentle touch (1-10 cm/s) and seems linked to the transmission of affective and affiliative aspects of touch. In this context, does “my body” matter? Body ownership is the feeling that the body and its parts belong to the self, constituting a unitary entity capable of interacting with the environment. This concept is tightly related to the pre-reflexive experience of being – with our own body – the subject of a given experience. An invaluable tool for studying the sense of body ownership is Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR), which has the capability to induce an illusory sense of embodiment (SoE) over a virtual body. IVR was successful in inducing an illusory sense of ownership over a virtual body of in-groups differing in ethnicity, age, size, and gender. Moreover, illusory ownership was associated with changes in explicit and implicit higher-level attitudes and beliefs of the subjects undergoing the illusion. It has been proposed that the acquired physical similarity between the self and the avatar, mainly originating from bottom-up sensory stimuli and first-person perspective (1PP), is able to impact on higher-level cognitive processes, so that also representations of the self and the outgroup become linked.
In this talk, I will outline the experimental paradigm we are implementing, as well as the theory behind it. Furthermore, I will summarize some preliminary results we obtained by analysing a sample of 12 subjects (6 females), while also proposing what is to be done next.