Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

Who turned the light on? How avatar's embodiment modulates sense of agency in virtual reality.

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Marika Mariano¹ (marika.mariano@unimib.it), Giulia Stanco¹, Caterina Negrone¹, Niccolò Raffa¹, Massimo Montanaro^1,2, Emanuele Sapio^1,2, Alessandro Gabbiadini^1,2, Laura Zapparoli^1,3; ¹Psychology Department and NeuroMi – Milan Centre for Neuroscience, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy, ²Mibtec – Mind and Behavior Technological Center, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy, ³IRCCS Orthopedic Institute Galeazzi, Milan, Italy

Virtual Reality (VR) allows the implementation of innovative rehabilitation, offering greater ecological validity in the context of motor functions. To be effective, these treatments should foster virtual embodiment, the process of becoming rooted in the virtual body, including a sense of agency towards the avatar’s movements. Here, we investigated different dimensions of the agency experience in VR (i.e., explicit and implicit), manipulating the avatar’s interactive capabilities (i.e., still vs. moving avatar). We tested 70 healthy adult participants in a VR setting while performing active or passive movements for turning on, after a variable delay, a lightbulb. Before the experiment, half of the participants could see their virtual hands move consistently with their real hand movements (group M+), whereas the other half saw their virtual hands stationary on a table (group M-). Explicit and implicit sense of agency was assessed (considering the intentional binding as an implicit index). Our results show that participants experience an explicit sense of agency (i.e., higher agency ratings in active trials), similarly in both VR scenarios (M+ and M-). This phenomenon is similarly experienced at the implicit level (i.e., significant intentional binding effect for temporally contingent outcomes), but only if real movements are mirrored by an avatar’s movements (M+ scenario). These results confirm the dissociation between implicit and explicit processing frequently seen in psychology and suggest the importance of being able to represent our movements in a virtual reality environment through the presence of an avatar whose movements simulate exactly the participants’ ones.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Motor control