Abstract
This study explores the extent to which individuals embodied in Virtual Reality tend to self-attribute the movements of their avatar. More specifically, we tested subjects performing goal-directed movements and distorted the mapping between user and avatar movements by decreasing or increasing the amplitude of the avatar hand movement required to reach for a target, while maintaining the apparent amplitude – visual distance – fixed. In two experiments, we asked subjects to report whether the movement that they have seen matched the movement that they have performed, or asked them to classify whether a distortion was making the task easier or harder to complete. Our results show that subjects perform poorly in detecting discrepancies when the nature of the distortion is not made explicit and that subjects are biased to self-attributing distorted movements that make the task easier. These findings, in line with previous accounts on the sense of agency, demonstrate the flexibility of avatar embodiment and open new perspectives for the design of guided interactions in Virtual Reality.
Highlights
Human perception is not a perfect capture of reality, and much of the information we experience as being collected from the external world is the product of brain inference [1]
Incongruent visual and tactile sensory input was used to evoke richer haptic sensations in a perceptual illusion known as pseudo-haptics [6], where visual stimulation could induce haptic sensations that are more complex than the physical interaction device is capable of representing
The ability to self-attribute a movement by correlating motor commands with the acquired sensory information, as we study here, is a significant factor to sustain an elevated sense of agency of a virtual body
Summary
Human perception is not a perfect capture of reality, and much of the information we experience as being collected from the external world is the product of brain inference [1]. Nielsen [12] has demonstrated that healthy subjects can be tricked to selfattribute movements that have been produced by another person This was the case even when there was a discrepancy between the performed and seen movements, with subjects reporting the feeling of strangeness and the impression that their hands have been pulled by some external force. This experiment shows that someone else’s hand can be perceived as one’s own, and that up to a certain limit, one can be fooled to self-attribute the actions of that hand
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