Using Virtual Reality to investigate the sense of self

The sense of self describes the normally continuous experience of being an "I", of owning a body and actions that we control and experience from a first-person perspective. Although typically intact, these senses can sometimes be disrupted. Dissociation, for example, describes a set of experiences which involve feeling detached from one's own body, from the outside world, or from one's own emotions.

In my PhD, I demonstrated how the smooth integration of different senses is key to maintaining the sense of one's own body. Using mixed-reality, I added a slight time delay between the sight and tactile feeling of a touch to the hand delivered by either the participant themselves or another person, which caused people to feel a loss of ownership over their body (Roel Lesur et al., 2020).

People with greater dissociation in their daily life reported a stronger loss of ownership over their body in the lab. Crucially, this research highlighted a potential mechanism for dissociative experiences, namely multisensory integration, which could be targeted by future treatments for this transdiagnostic mental health symptom.

As my PhD Research demonstrated, the rise in availability of Virtual Reality equipment offers a powerful tool for investigating embodiment (Kilteni et al, 2012). In VR, one can experience having a virtual body that is entirely different from one's own, and in Mixed-Reality, an extension of VR, virtual objects or manipulations can be applied to an individual's true body.

At the same time, the ever-expanding use of VR beyond academic research, for example in the metaverse, poses new questions about how we experience embodiment and selfhood. The metaverse can be understood as a fusion of the real world and digital worlds experienced in VR or MR. The metaverse concept already exists in multi-player online video games, but tech giants like Microsoft and Meta are keen to bring the metaverse to all walks of life, from shopping to social media (Rivea & Wiederhold, 2022).

How individuals want to experience themselves or their bodies in the metaverse is a timely and tricky question, the investigation of which could be enabled through tasks such as those used in my PhD. Such research has the potential to inform future policy on how the metaverse is implemented and governed.

A novel finding of my PhD research was that sensations of induced body dis-ownership, achieved with mixed-reality, were related to the types of experiences reported in dissociation. It may be possible that future therapies may be able to use the controlled, temporary feeling of induced body dis-ownership to help people learn how to cope with their real life experiences of dissociation.

A similar example exists in treatments for height phobias, where VR simulations of being in high places have proven to be effective tools in treating phobias (Freeman et al., 2018). My PhD research demonstrated the potential for a similar approach with dissociative experiences.

The proposed fellowship aims to maximise these potential impacts of my PhD research, by building and enhancing my publication record (O1) and developing my professional networks in this field (O2), both of which will help to disseminate my PhD findings to wider audiences. Additionally, I will develop my skills in VR programming (O3), which will be leveraged to create an open-source, engaging and accessible version of the mixed-reality task used in my PhD.

Completing these aims will consolidate my PhD work, position me as a leader in the field of investigating the sense of self with digital technologies and contribute to my development as an independent researcher capable of leading academic research and securing early career investigator grants such as the ESRC new investigator grant.