The authors set out to investigate how an OOB illusion influences the encoding of a moderately emotional event. They asked subjects to read material on four topics about which they were subsequently questioned, in separate sessions, by an actor portraying an eccentric professor. The exchange was video–audio-recorded by two camera–microphone sets; one set was located just above the subject's head (set 1) and the other was located either just above the professor's head or at a 30 degree angle from the subject (set 2). Through earphones and a head-mounted virtual-reality display, the subjects heard and viewed the live feed transmitted by set 1 (in two of the sessions) or set 2 (in the other two sessions). Thus, in half of the sessions, they had an almost normal, first-person in-body perspective of the event (the control condition), whereas in the other half, the subjects saw their own body from either the front or the side and experienced being at a distance from their real body (the experimental condition). Importantly, the subject's chest was stroked with a stick while an identical stick was moved in front of the camera, so that the subject felt the strokes and simultaneously 'saw' both their bodily self and their actual body being stroked on the chest. This multisensory manipulation has previously been shown to induce a rigorous full-body illusion. Indeed, in the experimental condition, the subjects reported that they felt their bodily self to be displaced from their actual body, resulting in an OOB illusion.
A week after the subjects had undergone the four presumably memorable 'exams' by the eccentric professor, they were asked to recall each of the events. This revealed that episodic recall of the two events that were encoded during the OOB illusion was less vivid than that of the two events that were encoded in the control sessions.
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