Avatar Appearance Shapes How Our Brain Responds to Virtual Actions – Neuroscience News

Summary: As interactions with artificial intelligence grow more common, understanding how our brains process avatars in virtual spaces is increasingly important. A new study reveals that people respond differently to avatars depending on whether they have human-like or inhuman bodies.

When participants anticipated avatar movements, brain signals associated with social perception were influenced by the avatar’s appearance. These findings suggest that our brains process virtual interactions much like real ones—shaped by physical cues—even when the other party isn’t human.

Key Facts:

• Appearance Matters: Human-like avatars altered participants’ neural responses during interaction.
• Movement Prediction: Brain activity varied more when participants had to predict the avatar’s movements.
• Social Processing: Neural systems tied to social cognition are sensitive to virtual body form.

Source: SfN

The growing prevalence of human interactions with artificial intelligence has increased the need for a better understanding of how the brain processes virtual reality.

Because how others behave and move can influence how people understand social scenes and even themselves, exploring whether avatar appearance influences virtual interactions is important.

To provide insight on this, Vanessa Era and colleagues from Sapienza University of Rome assessed interactions between human participants and avatars with human-like or inhuman bodies.  

Participants in this eNeuro paper observed avatars on a screen and tried to press an up or down button at the same time an avatar touched the top or bottom of a virtual bottle under different conditions: sometimes auditory cues were delivered to inform the participant of which button to press, and other times participants needed to predict the avatar’s movements.

The researchers discovered that people processed movements differently based on the avatar’s bodily appearance. Furthermore, a neural system dedicated to perceiving others’ movements differentially contributed to how participants discriminated between movements based off avatar appearance.

Some neural signals involved in assessing the movements of others in social settings were also influenced by the bodily appearance of the avatar.

This study sheds light on how people process interactions with virtual entities, which may help scientists improve how “real” social interactions are with artificial intelligence.  

About this neuroscience and AI research news

Author: SfN Media
Source: SfN
Contact: SfN Media – SfN
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News

Original Research: Closed access.
“The Bodily Appearance of a Virtual Partner Affects the Activity of the Action Observation and Action Monitoring Systems in a Minimally Interactive Task” by Vanessa Era et al. eNeuro

Abstract

The Bodily Appearance of a Virtual Partner Affects the Activity of the Action Observation and Action Monitoring Systems in a Minimally Interactive Task

One pending question in social neuroscience is whether interpersonal interactions are processed differently by the brain depending on the bodily characteristics of the interactor, i.e., their physical appearance.

To address this issue, we engaged participants in a minimally interactive task with an avatar either showing bodily features or not while recording their brain activity using Electroencephalography (EEG) in order to investigate indices of action observation and action monitoring processing.

Multivariate results showed that bodily compared to non-bodily appearance modulated parieto-occipital neural patterns throughout the entire duration of the observed movement and that, importantly, such patterns differ from the ones related to initial shape processing.

Furthermore, among the electrocortical indices of action monitoring, only the early observational Positivity (oPe) was responsive to the bodily appearance of the observed agent under the specific task requirement to predict the partner movement.

Taken together, these findings broaden the understanding of how bodily appearance shapes the spatiotemporal processing of an interactor’s movements.

This holds particular relevance in our modern society, where human-artificial (virtual or robotic) agent interactions are rapidly becoming ubiquitous.