Perceiving a 4 year old body leads to child’s memory

Mel Slater of the University of Barcelona in Spain and his team did a experiment in which they put 30 people in a virtual reality environment in the body of a 4-year-old child. They thought they had the body of a 4-year-old child. For example, they believed they were tall as the child. The virtual body moving in sync with movements of the real body, could be viewed from a first-person perspective and in a mirror in the virtual reality environment. In the virtual environment all objects are bigger than they actually were, but they judged their body to be as a 4-year-old child.

It suggests that we reference our own body size to judge the size of the environment we are in. The researchers also has shown that these illusion may has the same effect on higher-level cognitive process, like memory of childhood.

The team’s previous research shows that when a person acquires a body type they have never experienced, social and cultural expectations often influence how they relate to the new body.

Things we experience in a virtual landscape can also have profound effects on our behaviour in the real world: in a separate study by researchers at Stanford University in California, giving people superhero powers in a virtual environment made them behave in a more helpful manner in real life.

The researchers say that brain imaging studies would help them to understand the reorganisation that occurs when assimilating a new body. The motivation springs from a project looking at how to embody people in child-sized robots. "We thought we ought to look at the consequences of that first," says Slater.