Virtually Being Einstein Results in an Improvement in Cognitive Task Performance and a Decrease in Age Bias.

Domna Banakou,Sameer Kishore,Mel Slater

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00917

Abstract

The brain's body representation is amenable to rapid change, even though we tend to think of our bodies as relatively fixed and stable. For example, it has been shown that a life-sized body perceived in virtual reality as substituting the participant's real body, can be felt as if it were their own, and that the body type can induce perceptual, attitudinal and behavioral changes. Here we show that changes can also occur in cognitive processing and specifically, executive functioning. Fifteen male participants were embodied in a virtual body that signifies super-intelligence (Einstein) and 15 in a (Normal) virtual body of similar age to their own. The Einstein body participants performed better on a cognitive task than the Normal body, considering prior cognitive ability (IQ), with the improvement greatest for those with low self-esteem. Einstein embodiment also reduced implicit bias against older people. Hence virtual body ownership may additionally be used to enhance executive functioning.

Highlights

It has been demonstrated that it is quite straightforward to induce in healthy individuals the perceptual illusion that an object or fake body part is part of their own body—a body ownership illusion—illustrating the surprising plasticity of the brain’s body representation
In this paper we investigated whether embodiment of people in a virtual body that is strongly associated with high performing cognitive abilities would result in them exhibiting enhanced cognitive performance
The variable vrbody refers to the degree to which participants felt as if the body they saw when looking toward themselves was their own body, and mirror refers to the body they saw in the mirror

Summary

Introduction

It has been demonstrated that it is quite straightforward to induce in healthy individuals the perceptual illusion that an object or fake body part is part of their own body—a body ownership illusion—illustrating the surprising plasticity of the brain’s body representation. The rubber hand illusion (RHI) (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998) has shown that tapping and stroking a rubber hand placed in an anatomically plausible position on a table in front of a person, and synchronously tapping and stroking the corresponding occluded real hand usually leads to the illusion that the rubber hand is their own This illusion is both subjective and can be measured objectively through “proprioceptive drift”; when asked to blindly point toward their hand, participants will point more toward the rubber than the real hand. If the rubber hand is threatened, there are strong physiological and cortical responses in response to the perceived threat (Armel and Ramachandran, 2003; Zhang and Hommel, 2015) This illusion has been shown to work in immersive virtual reality (VR), where instead of a rubber arm, a virtual arm is seen in stereo 3D as coming out of the participant’s real shoulder (Slater et al, 2008). A threat to the virtual hand results in a motor response (Kilteni et al, 2012), including motor cortex activation (González-Franco et al, 2013)

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