Visual gravity contributes to subjective first-person perspective
Neuroscience of Consciousness May 9, 2016 C. Pfeiffer, Petr Grivaz, B. Herbelin et al.
The direction of a person's first-person perspective—the sense of where one experiences the world from—can be altered by conflicting multisensory cues about gravity. In healthy volunteers lying on their backs, visual motion of objects either toward or away from the body, combined with touch and vestibular signals, shifted the experienced direction of perspective. When visual motion was directed away from the body, participants more often reported a downward-directed perspective, contradicting their actual body orientation. These shifts correlated with changes in self-location, showing that visual gravitational cues help define the subjective viewpoint from which people perceive the world.