The plasticity of the bodily self: how function and age shape the acceptance of virtual bodies.

我们的身体构成了我们的心理体验。最近的研究表明，身体自我的感觉是灵活的。这在儿童中尤其明显，他们的身体正在发育，感官系统也在变化。什么形状的自我身体表现，它有多灵活？这可以使用新的虚拟现实方法来回答，从第一人称的角度来看，我们可以控制移动的虚拟物体。这些虚拟身体可能在功能上与自己的不同--能够伸展更远，穿过狭窄的空间，甚至飞行。通过测量虚拟身体功能的变化对身体所有权和控制权的影响，我们既可以揭示塑造自己身体表征的因素，也可以帮助开发这一重要的新技术。在这项资助中，我们将研究虚拟身体功能在我们如何理解自己的身体和接受新的虚拟身体方面的作用。此外，我们测试儿童是否表现出学习拥有和控制新身体的能力增强的能力。我们最终将这项工作与教育联系起来，测试这种虚拟体验在课堂环境中的应用效益。这个范围广泛的项目，涉及身体自我的基本问题，横跨感觉、运动、认知和发展心理学，以及计算机科学。通过一系列研究，我们将测试成人和儿童是否可以接受一个与他们自己的功能不同的虚拟身体(例如，伸得比他们自己的手更远的手；允许他们从狭窄的缝隙中挤出来的身体)。这些功能将由我们的计算机科学团队仔细开发；它们对身体所有权和控制力的影响将由我们的心理学团队进行严格的实验测试。我们将考察手动(手)控制和全身控制这两个重要且相辅相成的背景。使用包括自我报告、心理生理学和动作捕捉在内的各种方法，我们将测量用户在控制功能增强的虚拟身体和感觉对它们的归属感方面的学习情况。我们将研究如何训练用户接受虚拟身体，无论是在单一的实验阶段，还是在更长的一周时间里。通过跨年龄段的测试，我们将检验这样的预测，即与成年人相比，儿童的自我身体呈现具有很大的可塑性，这扩大了他们可以学习拥有和控制的虚拟身体的范围。在最后一项研究中，我们将检查我们开发的功能得到增强的机构的教育效益，测试它们是否能在学童中产生特定的空间信息学习收益。该项目是一项独特的跨学科努力，融合了理论和技术专业知识，以产生尖端工作。派·考伊博士(Durham心理学)是一位心理学家，他开创了对儿童身体表征和运动发育的实验研究。科罗拉多大学的吉利斯博士和潘博士(金匠计算机科学)是虚拟现实领域的专家。一个由学术界(例如梅尔·斯莱特教授)和工业界(例如英国广播公司和微软研究院的工作人员)组成的用户群体将确保该项目产生最大的社会和经济影响。社会和经济影响是贯穿该项目的一个重要层面。我们的教育实验考察了虚拟现实是否能具体帮助小学生学习空间信息，这是STEM的一项核心技能。这项工作为这项教育和技能培训技术的未来发展提供了一个平台。通过我们由学术界和工业界(如BBC、微软)的VR专家组成的用户小组，我们将向VR开发人员受众传达我们的工作，提供设计虚拟现实游戏的原则，以最大限度地发挥所有年龄段的用户群体中虚拟现实的潜力。

Our body structures our psychological experience. Recent work suggests that the sense of bodily self is flexible. This is especially apparent in children, whose bodies are growing and sensory systems changing. What shapes own-body representation, and how flexible is it? This can be answered using new virtual reality approaches where we control a moving virtual body, seen from a first-person perspective. These virtual bodies may be functionally different to one's own - able to reach further, fit through narrow spaces, or even fly. By measuring how changes to the virtual body's function impact upon body ownership and control, we can both reveal the factors which shape own-body representation and help develop this important new technology. In this grant we will study the role of virtual body function in how we understand our own bodies and accept new virtual bodies. Further, we test whether children show increased aptitude for learning to own and control new bodies. We finally bridge this work to education, testing the applied benefits of such virtual experiences in a classroom setting. This wide-ranging project, addressing fundamental questions about the bodily self, spans sensory, motor, cognitive and developmental Psychology, as well as Computer Science. We expect it to be of interest to a correspondingly broad academic audience, with results disseminated in international conferences and high quality academic journals.Across a series of studies, we will test whether adults and children can accept a virtual body whose function is different to their own (e.g. a hand which reaches further than their own; a body which allows them to squeeze through narrow gaps). These functions will be carefully developed by our Computer Science team; their impacts upon body ownership and control will be rigorously experimentally tested by our Psychology team. We will examine the two important and complementary contexts of manual (hand) control and whole-body control. Using a wide variety of measures including self-report, psychophysiology, and motion capture, we will measure how well users can learn both to control functionally augmented virtual bodies, and to feel a sense of ownership over them. We will examine how users can be trained to accept a virtual body as their own, both over a single experimental session and over a longer period of a week. By testing across age groups, we will test the prediction that there is substantial plasticity in own-body presentation in children compared to adults, which widens the range of virtual bodies they can learn to own and control. In a final study, we will examine the educational benefits of the functionally-enhanced bodies we develop, testing whether they produce specific learning gains for spatial information in schoolchildren.The project is a unique cross-disciplinary effort, incorporating theoretical and technical expertise to produce cutting-edge work. PI Dr Cowie (Durham Psychology), is a Psychologist who has pioneered experimental studies of children's body representation and motor development. Co-I's Dr Gillies and Dr Pan (Goldsmiths Computer Science) are experts on embodied virtual reality. A User group including individuals from academia (e.g. Prof. Mel Slater) and industry (e.g. staff in BBC; Microsoft Research) will ensure that the project has maximum societal and economic impact. Social and economic impact is an important seam running through the project. Our educational experiment examines whether VR can specifically help schoolchildren to learn spatial information, a core STEM skill. This work provides a platform for future developments of this technology for education and skill training. Through our User Group of VR experts from academia and industry (e.g. BBC, Microsoft), we will communicate our work to the VR developer audience, providing principles for designing virtual reality games which maximise the potential of embodied virtual reality in user groups of all ages.