Mental body representations are malleable and can be influenced by auditory cues. In the “Footsteps illusion,” real-time alterations of walking sounds simulate those produced by heavier or lighter bodies, affecting perceptions of body weight, speed, and gender traits, and triggering emotional, behavioral, and physiological changes. While body illusions are known to affect social attitudes, less is known about how social factors influence body perception malleability. We investigated whether social support networks modulate this malleability using the “Footsteps illusion,” given the social relevance of body weight. A total of 105 participants experienced three footstep sound conditions (heavier, lighter and control). We collected demographic, behavioral, physiological, and subjective data, along with body image and eating disorder questionnaires. Results showed that larger social support networks correlated with higher body image satisfaction and fewer eating disorder symptoms. Notably, the illusion had a stronger effect on those with smaller social networks, highlighting the moderating role of social support.

In the Auditory Pinocchio Illusion [Tajadura-Jiménez et al., 2017], participants perceive an elongation of their finger upon vertically pulling their finger and hearing a concurrent upward pitch glissando. This arguably relies on associating the ecologically unrelated upward pitch glissando to the finger and allows to separately assess the role of semantic and multisensory contributions. However, what is needed for the association to occur is unknown. In a first experiment, we manipulated top-down attention to the finger upon which either an ascending or descending sound would be produced. In a second experiment, we compared how different bottom-up multisensory cues (arising from actions performed on the finger) concurrent to the ascending or descending pitch affected finger length perception. Participants either pulled, touched or stretched their left index finger. Through a perceptual judgment task of finger landmark localization and questionnaire ratings, we measured participants’ perceived finger length in both experiments, and separately assessed their sensory imagery skills.
We recruited 40 participants. Data from two of them was discarded from the whole experiment; one due to data loss, and another because the participant reported falling asleep during the task. Data from an additional participant was discarded from Experiment 2 due to malfunctioning of the pressure sensor. Lastly, EMG sensor data from two additional participants from Experiment 1 were further discarded due to logging issues. Resulting in N = 38 for Experiment 1 and N = 37 for Experiment 2, and N = 36 for the EMG sensor data analyses of Experiment 1. Within each of two experiments, the same sample partook in two blocks. In the first block, we looked at how attention would influence finger length estimation. The research paper associated with this data can be found in [Roel Lesur et al., 2025]. The overview of the datasets is available at https://doi.org/10.21950/APLK06