Social Simon Effect in Virtual Reality: Investigating the Impact of Co-actor Avatar’s Visual Representation
Date：May 2024
Teams:The University of Tokyo
Writers:Xiaotong Li,Yuji Hatada,Takuji Narumi
Abstract
When engaging in joint actions in the real world, each individual achieves unconscious coordination with the other by automatically activating representations of the other’s behavior in the motor system. It has been investigated by examining the Social Simon Effect (SSE), which is a spatial stimulus–response interference induced by the presence and active engagement of a co-actor in a joint single response go/nogo task (the joint Simon task). On the other hand, collaborative co-actors are not always perceived in the same way between the real world and virtual reality (VR) as the visual representation of the avatar is thought to affect the perception of others’ presence and actions. In order to obtain design guidelines for a virtual environment (VE) that facilitates collaboration between users, this study looked into (1) whether SSE can occur during joint actions of avatars in a VE; and (2) how the visual representation of the co-actor’s avatar affects SSE; through the joint Simon task performed by two adjacent avatars. The results showed that SSE was induced when the co-actor’s avatar was displayed in full-body or was entirely transparent, but the SSE was weak when only the two hands were visible. These results suggested that participants perceived the full-body avatar as the socially engaged co-actor, representing its motions into their own motor planning. The same phenomenon occurred when the whole body of the co-actor was not visible, which could be attributed to the visibility of response actions and their consequential effects facilitated the occurrence of SSE. In contrast, the hand avatar, with its non-human-like appearance and seeming function independently of the entire body, inhibited the action co-representation process because it might be perceived as an unintentional artificial agent.
