In modern digital applications, users often interact with virtual representations of themselves or others, called avatars. We examined how these avatars and their perspectives influence stimulus-response compatibility in a Simon task. Participants responded to light/dark blue stimuli with left/right key presses in the presence of a task-irrelevant avatar. Changes in stimulus-response compatibility were used to quantify changes in the mental representation of the task and perspective taking toward this avatar. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that perspective taking for an avatar occurred in orthogonal stimulus-response mappings, causing a compatibility effect from the avatar's point of view. In the following two experiments we introduced a larger variety of angular disparities between the participant and avatar. In Experiment 3, the Simon effect with lateralized stimulus positions remained largely unaffected by the avatar, pointing toward an absence of perspective taking. In Experiment 4, after avatar hand movements were added in order to strengthen the participants' sense of agency over the avatar, a spatial compatibility effect from the avatar's perspective was observed again, and hints of the selective use of perspective taking on a trial-by-trial basis were found. Overall, the results indicate that users can incorporate the perspective of an avatar into their mental representation of a situation, even when this perspective is unnecessary to complete a task, but that certain contextual requirements have to be met.
If an actor takes the perspective of an avatar, spatial dissociations could arise between the perspective of the actor and the perspective of the avatar. These become particularly interesting when solving spatial compatibility tasks. Effects of spatial compatibility are usually explained by a match or mismatch of automatic behavioural tendencies and intentional mapping processes. The question is whether actors develop such behavioural tendencies for an avatar and thereby are able to neglect their own perspective. In the experiments, actors take the perspective of the avatar and pressed ipsilateral or contralateral left-right keys in response to lateralised coloured discs. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that compatibility effects are tied to the avatar but not to the actor. Experiment 3 revealed that participants could ignore the perspective of the avatar. We concluded that the automatic behavioural tendencies in compatibility experiments are not as automatic as sometimes assumed. It is likely that the present results are not only applicable to the use of avatars but also to other human-controlled robots and drones.
Modern computer-based applications often require the user to interact with avatars. Depending on the task at hand, spatial dissociation between the orientations of the user and the avatars might arise. As a consequence, the user has to adopt the avatar’s perspective and identify herself/himself with the avatar, possibly changing the user’s self-representation in the process. The present study aims to identify the conditions that benefit this change of perspective with objective performance measures and subjective self-estimations by integrating the idea of avatar-ownership into the cognitive phenomenon of spatial compatibility. Two different instructions were used to manipulate a user’s perceived ownership of an avatar in otherwise identical situations. Users with the high-ownership instruction reported higher levels of perceived ownership of the avatar and showed larger spatial compatibility effects from the avatar’s point of view in comparison to the low ownership instruction. This supports the hypothesis that perceived ownership benefits perspective taking.
Putting oneself in the shoes of a digital alter ego becomes an increasingly relevant part of our everyday experience. In modern day psychology, these interactions can be examined within the frameworks of visual perspective taking and body ownership. Both target similar questions: What does it take, to become one with the avatar? When do we show the same behavior and make the same experiences, as if we were in its place? In this study, we want to address the role of action effect consistency for these concepts. We manipulated the participants’ sense of agency over a task-irrelevant avatar in a Simon task by providing either corresponding or random action effects. These effects could be either embodied and therefore linked to the avatar (Experiment 1) or independent of it (Experiment 2). We used stimulus-response compatibility effects from the avatar’s point of view as a measure for spontaneous visual perspective taking and a questionnaire to measure the perceived body ownership of the avatar. The results showed that corresponding action effects lead to increased spontaneous perspective taking of the avatar, regardless of whether the effect was linked to the avatar or not. Though the avatar compatibility effects were overall more pronounced in the embodied action effect condition. However, significant differences in perceived body ownership were only observed if the effects were linked to the avatar. The results might prove useful to further our understanding of subjective and objective measurements of interactions with avatars.
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