Visual perception of one's own body under vestibular stimulation using biometric self-avatars in virtual reality.

Our results suggest that vestibular stimulation does not directly influence the explicit somatosensory representation of our body. It is possible that in non-brain-damaged, healthy subjects, changes in whole body size perception are principally not mediated by vestibular information. Alternatively, visual feedback and/or memory may dominate multisensory integration and thereby override possibly existing modulations of body perception by vestibular stimulation. The present observations suggest that multisensory integration and not the processing of a single sensory input is the crucial mechanism in generating our body representation in relation to the external world.