Effect of Body Direction on Taking the Perspective of a Humanoid Avatar in a Virtual Environment
Understanding another’s viewpoint is the ability to infer others’ minds, which is important for successful social communication. To clarify this process, we investigated whether employing a humanoid avatar as the viewpoint would facilitate an imagined perspective shift in a virtual environment. We used a task that involved reporting how an object looks by a simple direction judgment either from the avatar’s position or an empty chair’s position. We found that the humanoid avatar’s presence improved task performance. Furthermore, the avatar’s facilitation effect was observed only when the avatar was facing the visual stimulus to be judged; performance was worse when it faced backwards. This suggests that the facilitation effect is based not only on attention capture but also the embodied perspective-taking to the avatar.
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Due to technical limitations, full-text HTML conversion of this manuscript could not be completed. However, the latest manuscript can be downloaded and accessed as a PDF.
Posted 29 Dec, 2020
On 23 Dec, 2020
On 23 Dec, 2020
On 21 Dec, 2020
Effect of Body Direction on Taking the Perspective of a Humanoid Avatar in a Virtual Environment
Posted 29 Dec, 2020
On 23 Dec, 2020
On 23 Dec, 2020
On 21 Dec, 2020
Understanding another’s viewpoint is the ability to infer others’ minds, which is important for successful social communication. To clarify this process, we investigated whether employing a humanoid avatar as the viewpoint would facilitate an imagined perspective shift in a virtual environment. We used a task that involved reporting how an object looks by a simple direction judgment either from the avatar’s position or an empty chair’s position. We found that the humanoid avatar’s presence improved task performance. Furthermore, the avatar’s facilitation effect was observed only when the avatar was facing the visual stimulus to be judged; performance was worse when it faced backwards. This suggests that the facilitation effect is based not only on attention capture but also the embodied perspective-taking to the avatar.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Due to technical limitations, full-text HTML conversion of this manuscript could not be completed. However, the latest manuscript can be downloaded and accessed as a PDF.