Being Barbie: the size of one's own body determines the perceived size of the world.

ABSTRACT: A classical question in philosophy and psychology is if the sense of one's body influences how one visually perceives the world. Several theoreticians have suggested that our own body serves as a fundamental reference in visual perception of sizes and distances, although compelling experimental evidence for this hypothesis is lacking. In contrast, modern textbooks typically explain the perception of object size and distance by the combination of information from different visual cues. Here, we describe full body illusions in which subjects experience the ownership of a doll's body (80 cm or 30 cm) and a giant's body (400 cm) and use these as tools to demonstrate that the size of one's sensed own body directly influences the perception of object size and distance. These effects were quantif

SUBMITTER: van der Hoort B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3102093 | biostudies-literature | 2011

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature