Remember revisiting your preschool or kindergarten classroom once you were older, and realizing all those tables and sinks that are normal-sized in your memory were actually miniature? And that the giant hill you used to struggle up is more of a mound? Adults can regain that feeling of living in an oversize world just by putting on a virtual-reality headset. (Large kid who used to budge you in line for the slide not included.)
This is the latest spinoff of the rubber-hand illusion, a phenomenon in which watching a rubber hand being stroked with a paintbrush, while you feel a matching sensation on your own hand, creates an eerie sensation that the rubber hand is your own. Another recent study found that kids experience the illusion more strongly than adults. Aside from being a neat party trick, the research may have implications for amputees who experience phantom limbs.
The illusion's ...
