Taking time to take perspective? Rapidly changing reference frames in the avatar-Simon task

Perspective Taking and Avatar-Self Merging

Today, avatars often represent users in digital worlds such as in video games or workplace applications. Avatars embody the user and perform their actions in these artificial environments. As a result, users sometimes develop the feeling that their self merges with their avatar. The user realizes that they are the avatar, but the avatar is also the user—meaning that avatar’s appearance, character, and actions also affect their self. In the present paper, we first introduce the event-coding approach of the self and then argue based on the reviewed literature on human-avatar interaction that a self-controlled avatar can lead to avatar-self merging: the user sets their own goals in the virtual environment, plans and executes the avatar’s actions, and compares the predicted with the actual motion outcomes of the avatar. This makes the user feel body ownership and agency over the avatar’s action. Following the event-coding account, avatar-self merging should not be seen as an all-or-nothing process, but rather as a continuous process to which various factors contribute, including successfully taking the perspective of the avatar. Against this background, we discuss affective, cognitive, and visuo-spatial perspective taking of the avatar. As evidence for avatar-self merging, we present findings showing that when users take the avatar’s perspective, they can show spontaneous behavioral tendencies that run counter to their own.

Seeing through the cat's eyes: evidence of a spontaneous perspective taking process using a non-human avatar

In many daily face-to-face interactions, people are able to take the perspective of others, for example, coding right and left based on point-of-view of others. In the present study, we investigated whether observers are able to take the perspective of a non-human figure such as a cat, observing the same effects obtained with human or robot avatars. In both experiments, we used a centrally presented stimulus (i.e. a cat), with its tail lateralized to the left or to the right. Participants had to respond to the side of the tail with a lateralized keypress. In Experiment 1 (spatial perspective taking task), participants were required to explicitly adopt the cat's perspective to respond, whereas in Experiment 2 (SR compatibility task), this was not explicitly required. In both experiments, faster RTs are obtained when the cat is presented back, with a greater difference between front and back views when the tail is on the right; furthermore, there is no temporal modulation of the back-front effect. These common results between the two experiments are interpreted on the basis of the spatial perspective taking processes, elicited voluntarily (Experiment 1) or spontaneously (Experiment 2).

No evidence for automatic response activation with target onset in the avatar-compatibility task

When people take the perspective of an avatar and perform a stimulus-response compatibility task, they generally show the same compatibility effects that are expected from the avatar's position instead of their own. In this study, we investigated if these effects are caused by automatic response activation, a concept featured in dual-route models of stimulus-response compatibility. In two experiments we asked 24 participants each to perform a compatibility task from an avatar's point of view. We introduced a delay between the presentation of the target and the avatar in half of the trials so that the participants had to wait until the avatar appeared to select the correct response. Because the automatic response activation is known to decay quickly, its influence is eliminated in this condition. In contrast to the prediction by the automatic response activation account, we observed a larger compatibility effect in the delayed condition with orthogonal (Experiment 1) and parallel (Experiment 2) stimulus-response pairings. Additionally, distributional analyses of the compatibility effects did not support the automaticity predictions. We conclude that these results call into question the role of automatic response activation for spatial compatibility in general and perspective-based compatibility effects in particular.

Object affordances from the perspective of an avatar

Humans often interact with avatars in video gaming, workplace, or health applications, for instance. The present research studied object affordances from an avatar's perspective. In two experiments, participants responded to objects with a left/right keypress, indicating whether the objects were upright or inverted. Task-irrelevant objects' handles were aligned with either the left or right hand of the actor and/or avatar. We hypothesized that actors respond faster when the handles are aligned, as compared to non-aligned, with the respective avatar hand (spatial alignment effect or object-based Simon effect). In Experiment 1, the spatial alignment effect was increased through the presentation of avatar hands as compared to when no hands were presented. In Experiment 2, the avatar perspective was rotated by 90° to the right and left of the actor's view. Here, the spatial alignment effect was guided by the avatar, suggesting that the actors took its perspective when perceiving objects' affordances.

Spatial-numerical associations in the presence of an avatar

When we interact with other people or avatars, they often provide an alternative spatial frame of reference compared to our own. Previous studies introduced avatars into stimulus–response compatibility tasks and demonstrated compatibility effects as if the participant was viewing the task from the avatar’s point of view. However, the origin of this effect of perspective taking remained unclear. To distinguish changes in stimulus coding from changes in response coding, caused by the avatar, two experiments were conducted that combined a SNARC task and a spontaneous visual perspective taking task to specify the role of response coding. We observed compatibility effects that were based on the avatar’s perspective rather than the participants’ own. Because number magnitude was independent of the avatar’s perspective, the observed changes in compatibility caused by different perspectives indicate changes in response coding. These changes in response coding are only significant when they are accompanied by visual action effects.