Our results demonstrate that body ownership is influenced by cues which not only pertain to the body itself but also those arising outside of the body, and suggest that in goal-oriented tasks body ownership might result from the consistency of forward models.

Despite the extensive research on spatial navigation, learning and VTE in the rat model, fewer studies have focused on humans. Here, we tested whether head-scanning behaviors that humans typically exhibit during spatial navigation are as predictive of spatial learning as in the rat. Our findings demonstrate that VTE is a signature of the stage of spatial learning in humans, and can be used to predict performance in navigation tasks with high accuracy.