The virtual-reality full-body illusion paradigm has been suggested to not only trigger the illusory ownership of the avatar's body but also the attitudinal and behavioral components stereotypically associated to that kind of virtual body. In the present study, we investigated whether this was true for stereotypes related to body size: body satisfaction and eating control behavior. Healthy participants underwent the full-body illusion paradigm with an avatar having either a larger or a slimmer body than their own, and were assessed for implicit attitudes towards body image and food calorie content at baseline and after each full-body illusion session. Results showed that the illusion emerged regardless of the avatar's body size, whereas the perceived dimension of the own body size changed according to the avatar's body size (i.e., participants felt to be slimmer after embodying their slim avatar and larger after embodying their large avatar). Crucially, we found that implicit attitudes towards food, but not those towards one's own body, were modulated by the size of the virtual body. Compared to baseline, ownership of a slimmer avatar increased the avoidance of high-calorie food, whereas ownership of a larger avatar did not induce changes. Our findings suggest that the illusory feeling of being slimmer drives also the food-related stereotypes associated with that body size, increasing the regulation of eating behaviors.

In the Weapon Identification Task (WIT), Black faces prime the identification of guns compared with tools. We measured race-induced changes in visual awareness of guns and tools using continuous flash suppression (CFS). Eighty-four participants, primed with Black or Asian faces, indicated the location of a gun or tool target that was temporarily rendered invisible through CFS, which provides a sensitive measure of effects on early visual processing. The same participants also completed a standard (non-CFS) WIT. We replicated the standard race-priming effect in the WIT. In the CFS task, Black and Asian primes did not affect the time guns and tools needed to enter awareness. Thus, race priming does not alter early visual processing but does change the identification of guns and tools. This confirms that race-priming originates from later post-perceptual memory- or response-related processing.

Pseudoneglect phenomenon refers to a condition in which healthy subjects tend to perceive the left side of exactly bisected lines as being slightly longer than the right one. However, behavioural data showed that athletes practising an open-skill sport display less pseudoneglect than the general population. Given the fact that so-called exergames (also known as active video games) are platforms designed to fully mimic sport activity, this work intends to investigate whether and how a one-week training period of exergame open-skill sport can determine a similar decrease in pseudoneglect. Fifteen healthy participants (non-athletes) responded to a visuospatial attention task and a control memory task in basal conditions (t0: Pre-game) and after a short period (one week, one hour/day) of tennis exergaming (t1: Post-game). In the Post-game condition, subjects from this experimental group (ExerGame group: EG) reduced leftward space overestimation and made significantly fewer leftward errors compared to the Pre-game condition. Additionally, two other experimental groups were employed: one evaluated within the same conditions of the main experiment but using a non-exergame (Non-Exergame groups: NEG) and the other one without any video game stimulus (Sedentary group: SE). Our findings suggest that daily training of a tennis exergame seems to be able to improve visuospatial attention isotropy by reducing leftward space overestimation, whereas outcomes from non-exergaming and sedentary activity do not modify subjects’ performance.

The vestibular system is increasingly recognized for its role in higher-order cognitive functions, including bodily self-representation. However, its involvement in self-face representation remains unexplored. In the present study, we investigated whether artificial modulation of the vestibular system via Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation (GVS) can influence the representation of one's own and others' faces. Fifty healthy individuals performed two face-recognition tasks (explicit and implicit) while receiving sinusoidal bipolar GVS or Sham stimulation. During tasks, images of faces belonging to Self (S), Familiar-Others (FO), and Stranger-Others (SO) were presented. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups according to GVS polarity: left-anodal/right-cathodal (L-GVS) or right-anodal/left-cathodal (R-GVS). In both tasks, a robust Self Advantage (SA) emerged, with faster reaction times (RTs) for self-faces than familiar-other and stranger-other faces. Interestingly, an interaction between Identity, Stimulation, and GVS polarity was observed only in the explicit task. Specifically, R-GVS slowed recognition of self-faces relative to Sham. In contrast, L-GVS slowed recognition of stranger-other faces while facilitating recognition of familiar-other faces. Notably, under L-GVS RTs for self-faces no longer differ from those of familiar-other faces, effectively shifting the SA toward a more general familiarity advantage. Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation modulates face recognition and self-other distinction, in a polarity-dependent manner, providing causal evidence for vestibular involvement in self-face representation and identity processing.

Faces play a pivotal role in human interaction, and the rapid processing of face identity and emotional expressions is essential for effective social behaviour. Here, we investigated whether and how face identity and emotional expressions jointly affect face visual awareness. We manipulated three levels of identity (Self, Friend, Stranger) and emotional expressions (Happy, Neutral, Angry) in a Binocular Rivalry (BR) paradigm. Results show that Neutral faces dominated longer visual perception as a function of familiarity (i.e. progressing from Stranger to Friend to Self). Happy emotion led to prioritising faces belonging to the social ingroup (i.e. Self and Friend). In contrast, we did not observe any effect of identity on angry emotion. These findings suggest that the visual system prioritises ingroup faces when they express positive emotional contents, whereas it inhibits such an advantage with negative contents. These data suggest that the interaction between identity and emotional content may already occur at the initial stages of perceptual processing through bottom-up sensory modulation.

Breaking continuous flash suppression (bCFS) is a widely used experimental paradigm that exploits detection tasks to measure the time an initially invisible stimulus requires to escape interocular suppression and access awareness. One pretty contentious and unresolved issue is whether differences in detection times reflect unconscious or conscious processing. To answer this question, here we introduce a novel approach (i.e., reverse-bCFS [rev-bCFS]) that measures the time an initially visible stimulus requires to be suppressed from awareness. Results from two experiments using face stimuli indicate that rev-bCFS can capture conscious effects, which indicates that contrasting standard bCFS with rev-bCFS can isolate unconscious processing occurring specifically during bCFS. For example, while face inversion impacted both bCFS and rev-bCFS, effects were larger in bCFS, suggesting a distinct contribution of unconscious processing to the advantage of upright over inverted faces in accessing awareness. Combining standard bCFS and rev-bCFS may offer a fruitful approach able to disentangle conscious and unconscious effects occurring during interocular suppression.