Although it has been shown that immersive virtual reality can be used to induce illusions of ownership over a virtual body , information on whether this changes implicit interpersonal attitudes is meager. Here we demonstrate that embodiment of light-skinned participants in a dark-skinned VB significantly reduced implicit racial bias against dark-skinned people, in contrast to embodiment in light-skinned, purple-skinned or with no VB. 60 females participated in this between-groups experiment, with a VB substituting their own, with full-body visuomotor synchrony, reflected (...) also in a virtual mirror. A racial Implicit Association Test was administered at least three days prior to the experiment, and immediately after the IVR exposure. The change from pre- to post-experience IAT scores suggests that the dark-skinned embodied condition decreased implicit racial bias more than the other conditions. Thus, embodiment may change negative interpersonal attitudes and thus represent a powerful tool for exploring such fundamental psychological and societal phenomena. (shrink)

Previous research using immersive virtual reality (VR) has shown that after a short period of embodiment of White people in a Black virtual body their implicit racial bias against Black people diminishes. Here we tested the effects of some socio-cognitive variables that could contribute to enhancing or reducing the implicit racial bias. The first aim of the study was to assess the beneficial effects of cooperation within a VR scenario, the second aim was to provide preliminary testing of the hypothesis (...) that empathy and political attitudes could contribute to implicit bias about race, while the third aim was to explore the relationship between political attitudes and empathy. We had (Caucasian) participants embodied in a Black virtual body and engaged either in a cooperative (Coop group) or in a non-cooperative (Neutral group) activity with a confederate experimenter embodying another Black avatar. Before and after VR, we measured participants’ implicit racial bias by means of Implicit Association Test (IAT) and their perceived closeness toward the confederate experimenter. Before VR we also assessed participants’ political attitudes and empathy traits. Results revealed that, as compared to the Neutral group, the Coop group showed lower IAT scores after the social interaction. Interestingly, in the Neutral but not the Coop group the perceived closeness toward the confederate experimenter was associated with the initial racial bias: the more the participants reduced their distance, the more they reduced their IAT score. Moreover, reported traits of empathy and political attitudes significantly explained the variance observed in the initial implicit bias, with perspective-taking, empathic concern, and personal distress being significant predictors of the IAT scores. Finally, there was a relationship between political attitudes and empathy: the more participants considered themselves as left-wing voters, the higher their perspective-taking and empathic concern scores. We discuss these findings within the neuroscientific and social cognition field and encourage scholars from different domains to further explore whether and under which conditions a given manipulation for reducing racial bias could be efficiently transposed in VR. (shrink)

Previous studies on body ownership illusions have shown that under certain multimodal conditions, healthy people can experience artificial body-parts as if they were part of their own body, with direct physiological consequences for the real limb that gets ‘substituted’. In this study we wanted to assess (a) whether healthy people can experience ‘missing’ a body-part through illusory ownership of an amputated virtual body, and (b) whether this would cause corticospinal excitability changes in muscles associated with the ‘missing’ body-part. Forty right-handed (...) participants saw a virtual body from a first person perspective but for half of them the virtual body was missing a part of its right arm. Single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation was applied before and after the experiment to left and right motor cortices. Motor evoked potentials (MEPs) were recorded from the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) and the extensor digitorum communis (EDC) of each hand. We found that the stronger the illusion of amputation and arm ownership, the more the reduction of MEP amplitudes of the EDC muscle for the contralateral sensorimotor cortex. In contrast, no association was found for the EDC amplitudes in the ipsilateral cortex and for the FDI amplitudes in both contralateral and ipsilateral cortices. Our study provides evidence that a short-term illusory perception of missing a body-part can trigger inhibitory effects on corticospinal pathways and importantly in the absence of any limb deafferentation or disuse. (shrink)

The prevailing scientific paradigm is that matter is primary and everything, including consciousness can be derived from the laws governing matter. Although the scientific explanation of consciousness on these lines has not been realized, in this view it is only a matter of time before consciousness will be explained through neurobiological activity in the brain, and nothing else. There is an alternative view that holds that it is fundamentally impossible to explain how subjectivity can arise solely out of material processes—“the (...) hard problem of consciousness”—and instead consciousness should be regarded in itself as a primary force in nature. This view attempts to derive, for example, the laws of physics from models of consciousness, instead of the other way around. While as scientists we can understand and have an intuition for the first paradigm, it is very difficult to understand what “consciousness is primary” might mean since it has no intuitive scientific grounding. Here we show that worlds experienced through virtual reality are such that consciousness is a first order phenomenon. We discuss the Interface Theory of Perception which claims that in physical reality perceptions are not veridical and that we do not see the “truth” but that perception is based on evolutionary payoffs. We show that this theory may provide an accurate description of perception and consciousness within VR, and we put forward an experimental study that could throw light on this. We conclude that VR does offer an experimental frame that provides intuition with respect to the idea that “consciousness is first” and what this might mean regarding the perceived world. However, we do not draw any conclusions about the veracity of this notion with respect to physical reality or question the emergence of consciousness from brain function. (shrink)