Everything looks bigger when you’re a virtual child

If this man were given an infant's body in this virtual world, he'd perceive objects as much larger than he would if he were given an adult's body.

NASA

If you’ve gone back to your old elementary school recently, you’ll recognize the feeling: classrooms, desks, and playgrounds that you used to think were huge and expansive are suddenly tiny, unimpressive, and claustrophobic. We perceive the world around us very differently as adults compared to back when we were kids. But can we return to that earlier state, seeing objects and places as we did when we were little?

By experimenting with virtual reality avatars, a group of European researchers found that seeing the world through someone else’s eyes is possible—and it can change how we think. By tricking subjects’ brains into thinking they were inhabiting the body of a child, the scientists could actually alter how people perceived objects in their environment.

Several earlier studies have suggested that virtual reality can let a person “own” a body that isn’t theirs; for instance, people experience physiological changes such as heart rate deceleration in response to a threat to their avatar in a virtual world, just as they would in real life. However, whether or not this “ownership” extends to the way that a person perceives the surrounding environment hadn’t yet been explored.