Audio Technique Makes People Feel That Their Doppelganger Is In The Room With Them

In this study, published in Consciousness and Cognition, participants (N=25) produced a series of tightly controlled binaural recordings of themselves walking into a room and reading excerpts from The Little Prince. One set of microphones were placed in the ears of a dummy sitting across the room from the participants, in order to create recordings with true-to-life location cues. Another set of microphones recorded from the ears of the participants themselves. Participants then sat with their head in the same location and position as the dummy head used for the recordings. While watching a virtual empty room through a VR headset, the participants were played three binaural audio recordings as separate conditions: the recording that had been taken from their own ears, in which they heard themselves from their own location (the self-egocentric condition); the recording that had been taken from the dummy, in which they heard themselves from across the room (the self-allocentric condition); and a recording that had been taken of a gender-matched person speaking from across the room (the other-allocentric condition). After each of these conditions, they answered a 14-point questionnaire measuring how closely participants felt that there was another presence in the room, and how closely they identified it as themselves. In the second block, participants were played audio of either themselves or matched others navigating around the room, reading from an experimental script â€...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Illusions Perception Source Type: blogs