Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2021 Jul 8:12:695358.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.695358. eCollection 2021.

Avatar-User Bond as Meta-Cognitive Experience: Explicating Identification and Embodiment as Cognitive Fluency

Young June Sah  1 , Minjin Rheu  2 , Rabindra Ratan  2
Affiliations
Review

Avatar-User Bond as Meta-Cognitive Experience: Explicating Identification and Embodiment as Cognitive Fluency

Young June Sah et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

Scholars have not reached an agreement on a theoretical foundation that underlies the psychological effects of avatar use on users. One group of scholars focuses on the perceptual nature of avatar use, proposing that perceiving the self-being represented by a virtual representation leads to the effects (i.e., Proteus effect). Another group suggests that social traits in avatars prime users causing them to behave in accordance with the social traits (i.e., priming effects). We combine these two theoretical explanations and present an alternative approach, hinging on a concept of meta-cognitive experience. The psychological mechanism of the avatar-user bond is explicated in terms of cognitive fluency, a type of meta-cognitive experience reflecting an awareness of how readily or easily information is processed. Under this explication, two concepts related to avatar-user bond, identification and embodiment, are understood as the meta-cognitive experience of cognitive fluency at the level of one's identity and physical body, respectively. Existing empirical evidence on avatar effects is revisited to explore how this new theoretical framework can be applied.

Keywords: Proteus effect; avatar-user bond; cognitive fluency; embodiment; identification; meta-cognitive experience.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Similar articles

See all similar articles

References

    1. Bar M., Biederman I. (1998). Subliminal visual priming. Psychol. Sci. 9, 464–468. 10.1111/1467-9280.00086 - DOI
    1. Bargh J. A. (1994). “The four horsemen of automaticity: intention, awareness, efficiency, and control as separate issues,” in Handbook of Social Cognition. eds. Wyer R. S., Jr., Srull T. K. (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; ), 1–40.
    1. Bem D. J. (1972). “Self-perception theory,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. ed. Berkowitz L. (New York, NY: Academic Press; ), 1–62. Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0065260108600246 (Accessed October 26, 2014).
    1. Biocca F. (1997). The cyborg’s dilemma: embodiment in virtual environments. J. Comput. Mediat. Commun. 3, 12–26. 10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997.tb00070.x - DOI
    1. Botvinick M., Cohen J. (1998). Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see. Nature 391:756. 10.1038/35784, PMID: - DOI - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources