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• Two often proposed underlying factors of the developing bodily self were tested. • The sense of bodily self in early childhood is proposed to be malleable. • A self-recognition task was used to measure self-other blurring. • Multisensory stimulation altered the sense of bodily self in children. • Self-other blurring was diminished with the mother compared to a stranger. The mechanisms underlying the developing sense of bodily self are debated. Whereas some scholars stress the role of sensory factors, others propose the importance of contextual factors. By manipulating multisensory stimulation and social familiarity with the other person, we explored two factors that are proposed to relate to young children's developing sense of bodily self. Including an adult sample allowed us to investigate age-related differences of the malleability of the bodily self. To this end, the study implemented an enfacement illusion with children (N = 64) and adults (N = 33). Participants were exposed to one trial with synchronous interpersonal multisensory stimulation and one trial with asynchronous interpersonal multisensory stimulation—either with a stranger or with the mother as the other person. A self-recognition task using morph videos of self and other and an enfacement questionnaire were implemented as dependent measures. Results revealed evidence for the presence of the enfacement effect in children in both measures. The identity of the other person had a significant effect on the self-recognition task. Contrary to our hypothesis, the effect was significantly smaller in the caregiver condition. No significant differences between children and adults emerged. Our results demonstrate the role of both multisensory stimulation and contextual—here social familiarity—factors for the construction and development of a bodily self. The study provides developmental science with a novel approach to the bodily self by showing the validity of the self-recognition task in a child sample. Overall, the study supports proposals that the sense of bodily self is malleable early in development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Children and adults were exposed to a full body illusion in virtual reality. • Human likeness and visuomotor synchrony of the avatar were manipulated. • Subjective ownership responses were similar in children and adults. • Agency remained higher after experimental manipulations in children than adults. • The findings suggest differential development of agency and body ownership. The sense of a bodily self is thought to depend on adaptive weighting and integration of bodily afferents and prior beliefs. Evidence from studies using paradigms such as the rubber hand illusion and full body illusion suggests changes in the integration of visuotactile bodily signals throughout childhood. Here, we extended this line of research by assessing how bottom-up visuomotor synchrony and expectancy, modulated by visual appearance of virtual avatars, contribute to embodiment in children. We compared responses to a first-person perspective virtual full body illusion from 8- to 12-year-old children and adults while manipulating synchrony of the avatar's movements (synchronous, 0.5-s delay, or 1-s delay compared with the participant's movements) and appearance of the avatar (human or skeleton). We measured embodiment with both subjective questionnaires and objective skin conductance responses to virtual threat. Results showed that children experienced ownership for the virtual avatar in a similar way as adults, which was reduced with increasing asynchrony, and for the skeleton avatar as compared with the human avatar. This modulation of ownership was not reflected in the skin conductance responses, which were equally high in all experimental conditions and only showed a modulation of repetition by age. In contrast, in children the subjective experience of agency was less affected by the dampening effects of visuomotor asynchrony or reduced human likeness and was overall higher. These findings suggest that children can easily embody a virtual avatar but that different aspects of embodiment develop at different rates, which could have important implications for applications of embodied virtual reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]