Effects of Top-down Cognition on Sense of Body Ownership and Its Relation to Depersonalization Tendencies

Abstract

The sense of body ownership, the feeling that “my body belongs to me,” has been examined by the full body illusion (FBI) and others. In case studies of depersonalization with symptoms of difficulty in feeling that sense, it has been pointed out that the symptoms are chronic due to distortions in top-down cognition. In this study, we examined the relationship between the effects of top-down cognition on the sense of body ownership and depersonalization tendencies by adding manipulations of top-down cognition to the FBI procedure. The manipulations were performed before inducing the FBI. The degree of the FBI was measured by the skin conductance responses. The results showed that the higher the degree of depersonalization, the lower the degree of illusion when participants were made to regard a fake body as their own body. This suggests that top-down cognition may lead to a decreased sense of body ownership in depersonalization.