Effects of virtual body-representation on motor skill learning

Abstract

Motor learning is often hindered or facilitated by visual information from one’s body and its movement. However, it is unclear whether visual representation of the body itself facilitates motor learning. Thus, we tested the effects of virtual body-representation on motor learning through a virtual reality rotary pursuit task. In the task, visual feedback on participants’ movements was identical, but virtual body-representation differed by dividing the experimental conditions into three conditions: non-avatar, non-hand avatar, and hand-shaped avatar. We measured the differences in the rate of motor learning, body-ownership, and sense of agency in the three conditions. Although there were no differences in body-ownership and sense of agency between the conditions, the hand-shaped avatar condition was significantly superior to the other conditions in the rate of learning. These findings suggest that visually recognizing one’s body shape facilitates motor learning.

The impact of visual display of human motion on observers’ perception of music performance

“…Generally, these findings align with previous literature where anthropomorphic-like displays aided the perception of motion features, when compared to reduced motion versions [24,35,38,48,51]. Atkinson and colleagues [48] found that emotion classification accuracy from body expression was improved in video in relation to PL, and that movement exaggeration exponentiated accuracy levels for some emotions.…”

“…Narang and colleagues [24] found that self-recognition of motion was better with realistic 3D avatars than PL, while motion recognition of others was better with PL. Further, a recent VR study by Shin and colleagues [51] compared the effect of a hand-shaped avatar, a non-hand shaped avatar and no avatar in a motor learning task, confirming that the learning rate was facilitated by recognizing one's body form. This perspective is also reinforced by multiple studies in the field of human-computer interaction, where it is well established that animated characters influence how people engage with and perceive virtual environments [41,[52][53][54].…”

“…The major area of human perception of biological motion requires further research to understand how we grasp, interpret and interact with the world, others and ourselves. Studying it has potential applications for neurodevelopmental diseases [25], individual differences [23], motor learning [51] or interaction in VR environments [32,43,44].…”

“…The second perspective underpins that motion configurations do impact perceptual judgement, and that the ones most proximal to an anthropomorphic form convey better information than simplified versions [24,35,38,48,51]. Hodgins and colleagues [35] found that the detection of motion changes was better with an animated human polygonal model than with a stick figure.…”

First Steps Towards Facilitating the Learning of Using Wearable Lower-limb Exoskeletons withImmersive Virtual Reality

“…Furthermore, like VR, Immersive VR (IVR) allows the creation of highly personalized virtual environments (VE) with an adaptable number of visual feedback elements. In immersive VE, the use of avatars for self-representation is common and may have an important impact on user perception [55], interaction within the VE [56], and motor learning [57]. The use of avatars can allow for the visualization of one's movements in real-time and has been implemented throughout various studies to teach movements by imitation learning [58][59][60][61].…”