ArticleExperimental brain research2020
The impact of embodying an "elderly" body avatar on motor imagery.
Article in Experimental brain research, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 35 citations in OpenAlex.
- The threat of an embodied virtual belly affects gastric feelings depending on somatic, interoceptive and alexithymic characteristics of healthy women.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Assessment of body Schema distortions in early-onset schizophrenia.Schizophrenia research. Cognition · 2024Article
- A theoretical review of the Proteus effect: understanding the underlying processes.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- Preserved tactile distance estimation despite body representation distortions in individuals with fibromyalgia.Frontiers in pain research (Lausanne, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Impact of an overweight body representation in virtual reality on locomotion in a motor imagery task.Psychological research · 2023Article
- Article
- Supervised learning for analysing movement patterns in a virtual reality experiment.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Perspective Taking and Avatar-Self Merging.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Review
- Multisensory integration of visual cues from first- to third-person perspective avatars in the perception of self-motion.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2021Article
- Protean Kinematics: A Blended Model of VR Physics.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
When an individual embodies an avatar, the latter's characteristics or stereotype can change the individual's behavior and attitudes; this is known as the Proteus effect. Here, we looked at whether the embodiment of an avatar resembling an elderly adult (seen from a first-person perspective and facing a virtual mirror) changed mentally represented physical activity in a motor imagery task performed by young adult participants (N = 52). To ensure that the impact of embodiment of an elderly avatar on the motor imagery task was not influenced by a potentially confounded stereotype assimilation effect (due to the mere presence of an avatar), a "young" avatar and an "elderly" avatar were always present together in the virtual environment-even though only one (the self-avatar) was embodied at a given time. We found that it took longer for the participants to perform the motor imagery task with the elderly self-avatar than with the young self-avatar. The more negative the participant's beliefs about motor activity in the elderly, the greater the observed effect of the avatar on motor imagery performance. We conclude that knowledge about the characteristics of an embodied avatar can modify the subject's level of mentally represented physical activity.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.