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. 2020 Sep 1;10:14385. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-71467-z

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Perceptual illusion of having the opposite-sex body modulated the subjective experience of feeling masculine or feminine (Experiment I). (a) The participants (N = 32; 15 females) lay on a bed and wore a head-mounted display in which a body of an unknown male or female was shown from a first-person perspective (the participant’s real body was out of view). Video frames illustrate all four conditions for a male participant (top picture). For a female participant, the videos from the lower and upper rows would be swapped. In the synchronous conditions, touches applied to the participant and touches applied to the stranger’s body were matched (see the red triangle), whereas in the asynchronous conditions, touches applied to the participants were delayed by 1 s. We expected to induce the body-sex-change illusion specifically in the syncO condition, and the other conditions served as controls. (b) After each condition, the participants rated illusion (I1:I3) and control (C1:C4) statements on a 7-point scale (− 3—“strongly disagree”; + 3— “strongly agree”). The illusion statements assessed the feeling that the stranger’s body is one’s own, whereas the control statements controlled for any potential effects of suggestibility or task compliance. (c) Genuine ownership of the stranger’s body should be associated with increased physiological stress responses of the participant when the stranger’s body is physically threatened. Thus, we measured the participants’ skin conductance responses elicited by brief “knife threat” events that occurred in the videos. (d) Before the experiment (baseline) and after each condition, the participants rated how feminine or masculine they felt. The upper row shows scale assignment for female participants and the lower row for males. (e) The order of conditions was counterbalanced across the participants, and the whole experiment lasted ~ 30 min. (f) The illusion ratings and the magnitude of skin conductance responses were significantly higher in the synchronous than in the asynchronous conditions, which shows that the full-body ownership illusion was elicited as expected. (g) During syncO, the female participants indicated feeling less feminine, and the male participants indicated feeling less masculine than during other conditions. (h) Strong illusory ownership of the opposite-sex body was related to a significant shift toward the opposite gender, specifically in syncO. For clarity of display, only ratings from syncO and asyncO are shown; syncS, asyncS, and baseline are colored in gray for comparison. (i) The participants who experienced a strong body-sex-change illusion (above-median I1 ownership ratings: syncO–asyncO; N = 12) indicated feeling more masculine (females) or more feminine (males) during syncO than during other conditions. Plots show means ± SE.