Children's Embodiment of Non-Human Virtual Hand Forms.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Developmental Psychology
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• Adults integrate multisensory cues and top-down expectations for body ownership.
• Children may have more adaptable body representations than adults.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how children and adults establish ownership over virtual hands with varying forms in virtual reality.
• To examine the impact of movement synchrony and training on virtual hand ownership and fluency.
• To compare body representation flexibility between children and adults using virtual reality.

Main Methods:

• Virtual reality experiments involving children (6-8 years) and adults (N=45) experiencing four virtual hand forms.
• Assessing ownership and movement fluency with virtual hands under synchronous and asynchronous movement conditions.
• Short-term training with a non-human virtual form (crab-like claw) for a subset of child and adult participants.

Main Results:

• Human-like virtual hand forms and movement synchrony enhanced ownership for both children and adults.
• Children maintained ownership of human-like forms even with asynchronous movement, unlike adults.
• Training improved movement fluency and the perception of the virtual form as a tool, particularly in children.

Conclusions:

• Children's body representation is flexible, with distinct processing of multisensory input and top-down expectations compared to adults.
• Virtual reality training sharpens children's embodiment experiences more than adults.
• Short virtual experiences do not blur the distinction between the real and virtual self for children.