The Association Between Religious Adherence and Bodily Self-Awareness Malleability : Evidence from Mirror-box illusion study

Religious and cultural frameworks fundamentally shape human experience and influence self-perception and worldview. The bodily self emerges from the integration of bottom-up sensory signals with top-down expectations about the body, and it has been proposed that cultural and religious frameworks modulate this multisensory integration. Despite these theoretical proposals, no experimental study in cognitive neuroscience has directly examined whether religious adherence modulates the multisensory processes underlying body ownership and agency. The present study employed the Mirror Box Illusion (MBI), a multisensory manipulation that induces the subjective experience of ownership over a reflected hand. Two hypotheses were evaluated: higher religiosity may be associated with increased susceptibility to the illusion due to reduced attention to internal bodily signals, or with decreased susceptibility due to strengthened top-down body representations. Sixty-two right-handed female participants with varying levels of religiosity underwent synchronous and asynchronous visuomotor stimulation in the MBI paradigm, with both subjective embodiment and behavioral measures collected. Three indices of bodily self-awareness, body ownership, sense of agency, and proprioceptive drift, were assessed alongside interoceptive sensibility (BPQ-22) and strength of religious faith (SCSORF). Religiosity did not influence body ownership or proprioceptive drift but selectively affected the sense of agency: highly religious participants reported elevated agency in both conditions, with a reduced synchronous asynchronous difference attributable to maintained agency under visuomotor incongruence. Religiosity was negatively correlated with interoceptive sensibility; however, this relationship did not mediate the association between religiosity and agency. These findings suggest that stronger religious faith may be associated with a shift in sensory weighting, such that external visual cues are prioritized over motor-related signals.