Self-Consciousness, Embodiment, and Social Interactions Humans and Artificial Agents

From experiments in immersive virtual reality to studies of bodily awareness, new research highlights how embodiment underpins self-consciousness and social perception. Studies show that interoceptive and somatosensory cues—such as heartbeat-linked signals—influence how trustworthy we find other people, while shifts in bodily awareness and perspective-taking reveal how fragile and malleable our sense of self can be. As artificial agents become social partners, the challenge is to understand how trust and mental state attribution, long rooted in embodied human interaction, can be extended to machines—and what this means for the future of human–AI relationships.