Using Virtual Reality to investigate the sense of self

自我感描述了作为一个“我”的正常连续的体验，拥有一个身体和我们从第一人称视角控制和体验的行动。虽然这些感觉通常是完整的，但有时会被破坏。例如，解离描述了一系列体验，这些体验涉及与自己的身体、外部世界或自己的情感分离的感觉。在我的博士学位，我证明了如何顺利整合不同的感官是关键，以保持自己的身体的感觉。使用混合现实，我在参与者自己或另一个人的手触摸的视觉和触觉之间添加了轻微的时间延迟，这导致人们感觉失去了对自己身体的所有权（Roel Lesur等人，2020年）。在实验室中，日常生活中解离程度较高的人报告说，他们对自己身体的所有权丧失得更厉害。至关重要的是，这项研究强调了解离体验的潜在机制，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。正如我的博士研究所证明的那样，虚拟现实设备的可用性的增加为研究体现提供了一个强大的工具（Kilteni等人，2012）。在VR中，人们可以体验到与自己完全不同的虚拟身体，而在混合现实中，VR的扩展，虚拟物体或操纵可以应用于个人的真实身体。与此同时，VR在学术研究之外的不断扩大的使用，例如在虚拟宇宙中，提出了关于我们如何体验化身和自我的新问题。虚拟实境可以被理解为虚拟现实或MR中体验的真实的世界和数字世界的融合。虚拟实境的概念已经存在于多人在线视频游戏中，但像微软和Meta这样的科技巨头热衷于将虚拟实境带到各行各业，从购物到社交媒体（Rivea & Wiederhold，2022）。个人希望如何在虚拟宇宙中体验自己或自己的身体是一个及时而棘手的问题，可以通过我在博士学位中使用的任务来研究这个问题。这样的研究有可能为未来的政策提供关于如何实施和管理虚拟世界的信息。我的博士研究的一个新发现是，通过混合现实实现的诱导身体所有权丧失的感觉与解离中报告的体验类型有关。未来的治疗方法可能会利用这种受控制的、暂时的、被诱导的身体丧失所有权的感觉来帮助人们学习如何科普他们真实的生活中的解离体验。在高度恐惧症的治疗中存在类似的例子，其中在高处的VR模拟已被证明是治疗恐惧症的有效工具（Freeman等人，2018年）。我的博士研究证明了类似的方法与解离经验的潜力。拟议的奖学金旨在最大限度地发挥我的博士研究的这些潜在影响，通过建立和提高我的出版记录（O1）和发展我在这一领域的专业网络（O2），这两者都将有助于向更广泛的受众传播我的博士研究成果。此外，我将发展我在VR编程（O3）方面的技能，这将被用来创建一个开源的，吸引人的和可访问的版本的混合现实任务在我的博士学位。完成这些目标将巩固我的博士学位工作，使我成为数字技术研究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早期职业研究者赠款，如ESRC新研究者补助金。

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.