The DOI matches its Crossref record; 65 of the 65 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Being Barbie: the size of one’s own body determines the perceived size of the world.
Open accessAbstract
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 quantified in ten separate experiments with complementary verbal, questionnaire, manual, walking, and physiological measures. When participants experienced the tiny body as their own, they perceived objects to be larger and farther away, and when they experienced the large-body illusion, they perceived objects to be smaller and nearer. Importantly, despite identical retinal input, this "body size effect" was greater when the participants experienced a sense of ownership of the artificial bodies compared to a control condition in which ownership was disrupted. These findings are fundamentally important as they suggest a causal relationship between the representations of body space and external space. Thus, our own body size affects how we perceive the world.
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“The results demonstrated that the visual perception of distance and object sizes is affected by one's own multisensory body representation.”
From Illusory ownership of a virtual child body causes overestimation of object sizes and implicit attitude changes (2013) · cites this paper as [22]
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“It has been argued that body size serves a reference for the external world, and earlier studies using IVR have examined how the perception of one's body size influences the perception of spatial layouts (22).”
From Illusory ownership of a virtual child body causes overestimation of object sizes and implicit attitude changes (2013) · cites this paper as [22]
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“It has been shown that IVR supports global scaling of sizes, where the brain automatically adjusts for the overall size of one's avatar, which is in line with past studies (22).”
From Illusory ownership of a virtual child body causes overestimation of object sizes and implicit attitude changes (2013) · cites this paper as [22]
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“This further extends the findings of [20], [21] that it is possible to generate the illusion of ownership of quite a different body size and shape compared to normal”
From Extending body space in immersive virtual reality: a very long arm illusion (2012) · cites this paper as [20]
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Metadata
- Authors
- van der Hoort, B., Guterstam, A., & Ehrsson, H. H.
- Affiliations
- Karolinska Institutet (SE)
- Corresponding author
- Ehrsson, H. Henrik
- Venue
- PLoS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2011-05-25
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- e20195
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC3102093
- OpenAlex
- W1978014948
- Cited by
- 402
- References
- 62
- Citations by year
- 2026: 17 · 2025: 19 · 2024: 26 · 2023: 14 · 2022: 62 · 2021: 28 · 2020: 35 · 2019: 28 · 2018: 40 · 2017: 35 · 2016: 14 · 2015: 30 · 2014: 25 · 2013: 16 · 2012: 10
- FWCI
- 30.51
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Figshare (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- James S. McDonnell Foundation
- Stiftelsen för Strategisk Forskning
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Virtual Reality Applications and Impacts
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Visual perception and processing mechanisms
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Multisensory perception and integration
- Keywords
- body size, body ownership, body illusions, object size perception, distance perception, visual perception, body schema, body space, external space, self-perception
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Body Image, Female, Humans, Illusions, Male, Surveys and Questionnaires, Self Concept, Size Perception, Visual Perception, Body Size, Young Adult
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