Abstract
Experimental psychology research typically employs methods that greatly simplify the real-world conditions within which cognition occurs. This approach has been successful for isolating cognitive processes, but cannot adequately capture how perception operates in complex environments. In turn, real-world environments rarely afford the access and control required for rigorous scientific experimentation. In recent years, technology has advanced to provide a solution to these problems, through the development of affordable high-capability virtual reality (VR) equipment. The application of VR is now increasing rapidly in psychology, but the realism of its avatars, and the extent to which they visually represent real people, is captured poorly in current VR experiments. Here, we demonstrate a user-friendly method for creating photo-realistic avatars of real people and provide a series of studies to demonstrate their psychological characteristics. We show that avatar faces of familiar people are recognised with high accuracy (Study 1), replicate the familiarity advantage typically observed in real-world face matching (Study 2), and show that these avatars produce a similarity-space that corresponds closely with real photographs of the same faces (Study 3). These studies open the way to conducting psychological experiments on visual perception and social cognition with increased realism in VR.
Highlights
Over the last decade, Virtual reality (VR) has been increasingly utilised for psychological research (Loomis et al, 1999; McCall & Blascovich, 2009; Wilson & Soranzo, 2015)
We employ this approach to construct a set of 120 avatars with photo-realistic faces, and report three studies that demonstrate the potential of these as research stimuli, by showing high recognition rates for avatars with the faces of familiar people (Study 1) as well as a familiarity advantage for the matching of avatars to face photographs (Study 2). We demonstrate that these avatars produce a similarity-based face-space that closely resembles that of the real people upon whom they are based (Study 3)
Tukey’s honestly significant difference (HSD) confirmed that identification rates were substantially higher for both avatar and photograph than for avatars alone, t(42) = 37.30, p < .001, photos alone, t(42) = 35.42, p < .001, and cases where neither avatars nor photographs were recognised, t(42) = 34.73, p
Summary
Virtual reality (VR) has been increasingly utilised for psychological research (Loomis et al, 1999; McCall & Blascovich, 2009; Wilson & Soranzo, 2015). One aspect of VR that has so far received limited attention in psychology is the realism of its avatars, and the extent to which they visually represent real people. This is remarkable considering the ubiquity of the human face as a research stimulus in cognitive, developmental, forensic, and social psychology, and in neuroscience and neuropsychology (Bate, 2012; Bruce & Young, 1998; Hole & Bourne, 2010; Bindemann & Megreya, 2017; Rhodes et al, 2011). For example, faces are employed to study processes such as person identification (Bate & Murray, 2017; Bruce & Young, 1986; Fysh & Bindemann, 2017; Johnston & Edmonds, 2009; Ramon & Gobbini, 2018; Young & Burton, 2017), the allocation of visual attention (Langton et al, 2008; Ro et al, 2001), perspective taking (Hermens & Walker, 2012; Langton et al, 2006), and the recognition of emotional states (Keane et al, 2002; Morris et al, 1998; Zhou & Jenkins, 2020)
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