The robotically-induced drift in self-location confirms a classical finding of visual dominance (the “stroking” on the video) over somatosensory cues (the robotic stroking on the participant’s back) by inducing predicted changes in self-location (Lenggenhager et al., 2007, Lenggenhager et al., 2009 and Aspell Sunitinib et al., 2009) that have also been observed in drift measures during the related rubber hand illusion (Ehrsson

et al., 2004 and Tsakiris and Haggard, 2005). We report that the direction of these drift-related changes in self-location is consistent with the experienced direction of the first-person perspective during robotic stimulation. We argue that this is due to a different visual versus bodily http://www.selleckchem.com/products/DAPT-GSI-IX.html conflict that is related to the visual-vestibular gravitational conflict that we presented during stimulation. Thus, we used a visual image that contained

a conflict between the visual gravitational cues of the seen body and the actual vestibular (and somatosensory) gravitational cues signaled from the physical body of the participants. Showing a visual body that was filmed from an elevated camera perspective (Figure 1A), these visual gravitational cues of the seen body are in conflict with the actual vestibular (and somatosensory) gravitational cues from the participants’ physical bodies signaling that they are actually lying on their backs and looking upward. Accordingly, we argue that in participants from the Up-group, there is stronger reliance on vestibular (and somatosensory) cues than on visual gravitational cues (from the seen virtual body), whereas participants from the Down-group show the opposite pattern. This is concordant with three related findings. First, comparable effects have been reported in patients with OBEs of neurological origin with abnormal self-location and first-person perspective (Blanke et al., 2002 and Blanke et al., 2004). Thus, the large majority of patients with OBEs experience

themselves to be seeing from an elevated and down-looking, first-person perspective (Blanke and Arzy, 2005 and Blanke and Mohr, 2005), and this perspective is inverted and rotated by 180° with respect to their supine and upward-oriented Cytidine deaminase physical body position (Lopez and Blanke, 2011). OBEs have been previously linked with abnormal vestibular/gravitational signals and a deficit in visuo-vestibular integration (Lopez et al., 2008 and Schwabe and Blanke, 2008). The importance of vestibular signals and visuo-vestibular integration was also suggested in a recent self-location study in healthy subjects using manual stroking, that reported an association of vestibular sensations with experimentally induced changes in self-location (Lenggenhager et al., 2009). Second, visuo-vestibular integration is characterized by strong individual differences, as also found in the present study.