Using Virtual Reality to investigate the sense of self

自我意识描述了作为一个“我”的通常持续的体验，即拥有一个身体，以及我们从第一人称的角度控制和体验的行为。虽然这些感觉通常完好无损，但有时也会被破坏。例如，分离描述了一系列的体验，其中包括与自己的身体、外部世界或自己的情感分离的感觉。在我的博士学位中，我展示了不同感官的顺利整合是保持自己身体感觉的关键。使用混合现实，我在参与者自己或另一个人对手的触摸的视觉和触觉之间增加了轻微的时间延迟，这导致人们感觉对自己的身体失去了所有权(Roel Lesur等人，2020)。在日常生活中离群索居的人报告说，在实验室里对自己的身体失去所有权的情况更严重。至关重要的是，这项研究强调了分离体验的一种潜在机制，即多感觉整合，这可能是未来治疗这种跨诊断精神健康症状的目标。正如我的博士研究表明，虚拟现实设备的可用性的增加为研究具体化提供了一个强大的工具(Kilteni等人，2012)。在VR中，一个人可以体验到一个与自己完全不同的虚拟身体，而在混合现实中，VR、虚拟对象或操作的延伸可以应用到个人的真实身体上。与此同时，VR在学术研究之外的应用不断扩大，例如在虚拟世界中，这对我们如何体验化身和自我提出了新的问题。虚拟世界可以理解为现实世界和数字世界在VR或MR中体验的融合。虚拟世界的概念已经存在于多人在线视频游戏中，但微软和Meta等科技巨头热衷于将虚拟世界带到从购物到社交媒体的各行各业(Rivea&Wiederhold，2022)。个人希望如何在虚拟世界中体验自己或他们的身体是一个及时而棘手的问题，对这个问题的调查可以通过我的博士学位中使用的任务来实现。这样的研究有可能为未来如何实施和管理虚拟世界的政策提供信息。我的博士研究的一个新发现是，在混合现实中获得的诱导性身体分离的感觉与报告的分离体验的类型有关。未来的疗法可能能够利用可控的、暂时的诱导身体分离的感觉来帮助人们学习如何应对他们现实生活中的分离经历。类似的例子也存在于高度恐惧症的治疗中，事实证明，在高处进行VR模拟是治疗恐高症的有效工具(Freeman等人，2018年)。我的博士研究展示了利用分离体验的类似方法的潜力。拟议的奖学金旨在通过建立和增强我的发表记录(O1)和发展我在该领域的专业网络(O2)，最大化我博士研究的这些潜在影响，这两者都将有助于将我的博士研究成果传播给更广泛的受众。此外，我将发展我的VR编程技能(O3)，这将被用来创建我博士学位中使用的混合现实任务的开源、引人入胜和可访问的版本。完成这些目标将巩固我的博士工作，使我成为使用数字技术调查自我意识领域的领导者，并有助于我作为一名独立研究员的发展，能够领导学术研究，并获得职业生涯早期的研究员补助金，如ESRC新研究员补助金。

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.