Study Suggests Self-Awareness Can Be Shifted Through Avatar Embodiment (Even Across Age and Gender)

In a fascinating, potentially game-changing study recently reported on by New Scientist, researchers were able with virtual reality to make adult male test subjects feel like they were inside the body of a virtual girl. So when the girl was slapped by a virtual woman, the subjects' heart rates jumped as if they themselves were being attacked. Here's the video of how it works:

Hat tip: Robward Antwerp, who has some thoughts here. Though this experiment was conducted with virtual reality tech and not in Second Life, the findings are comparable to SL-based studies by Nick Yee and Jeremy Balienson of Stanford, which also show a connection between the avatars we control and our real life selves. To me what's most exciting about this new study (led by Mel Slater of the University of Barcelona), is how this shift of perspective happens despite sharp differences in age and gender -- suggesting that avatars can literally help us see the world from another person's point of view.

Comments

[brinda allen]

Absolutely. This typist recedes into an almost disembodied pair of hands when I log on to Secondlife... brinda Allen is "real", and she's not 68.
That identification didn't take but a few hours three years ago.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Anyone who's played a video game and flinched when their character got squished by a mushroom or did a 300 foot jump could have saved these researchers a lot of time.

Heck, anyone who's ever watched a movie and had their heart race as the hero or heroine goes through some struggle could have said the same.

Nothing new in this news.

[Adeon Writer]

I think the only reason he felt threatened is after seeing the girl stroked and feeling a real girl do the same, when he saw the girl get slapped he assumed he was about to get slapped irl as well. ;)

[Bob L]

Who would have thought men were capable of empathy?

[Melponeme_k]

This seems to be the same experiment over and over. A more benign one was about a group of children who saw avatars of themselves swimming with whales. It was so realistic, they actually believed they swam with whales.

This experiment hides a nasty fact about many men who play female avatars. They use them for exploitation. It was how Barbie got started before Mattel turned it into a child's toy. The original Barbie was a barely dressed fetish doll that hung on car dashboards. I don't think there was any empathy there.

And there isn't too much in this experiment either. Considering they used a standard male fantasy motif.

[Bob L]

" It was how Barbie got started before Mattel turned it into a child's toy. The original Barbie was a barely dressed fetish doll that hung on car dashboards. I don't think there was any empathy there."

Nice try. My girlfriend's father designed barbie for Mattel. Can you possibly be more full of shit?

[Melponeme_k]

Bob L,

This was the story given in a documentary I saw about Mattel. They even showed pictures of the dolls. It was based on a German comic character and marketed as something racy. The founder of Mattel purchased the doll and used it as a jumping off point for the American Barbie.

So why are YOU FULL OF SHIT?