Perspective Taking and Avatar-Self Merging.
Frontiers in Psychology January 1, 2022 Jochen Müsseler, Sophia Von Salm-Hoogstraeten, Christian Böffel
Avatars in digital environments can cause users to feel that their self merges with the avatar, a continuous process influenced by factors such as body ownership, agency, and perspective taking. The paper introduces an event-coding approach to the self and reviews human-avatar interaction literature to argue that self-controlled avatars lead to avatar-self merging through goal setting, action planning, and comparing predicted with actual motion outcomes. This merging is not all-or-nothing; it involves affective, cognitive, and visuo-spatial perspective taking. Evidence shows that users taking the avatar's perspective can exhibit spontaneous behavioral tendencies that contradict their own.