Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The mental model of one’s body plays an important role in de-termining subsequent actions. We changed the mental modelusing visual information and observed the effects of suchchange on pain perception. These effects were compared tothe effects of changes in the sense of body ownership, which isthe sensation that something is a part of one’s own body. Someresearchers have shown that the sense of ownership is a factormodulating pain perception. In our experiments, we manipu-lated the visibility of participants’ limbs using Mixed Reality(MR) techniques and measured their perceived pain and feel-ings while observing their limbs. Results showed the sensationthat nothing can touch one’s limbs decreased the strength ofperceived pain.