A Hand Age-Swap Proteus Effect on Memory and Movement

This paper describes an initial investigation of an approach for gathering data on older VR participants indirectly, not by actually enrolling older participants in the study, but rather by attempting to modify the cognitive and motor behavior of younger participants for it to resemble that of older participants. The behavior modification relies on the Proteus effect, a well-documented change in the behavior of a user of a VR application when provided with an incongruent self-avatar. A user study asked N = 30 participants in the 18 to 35 age group to play a memory game in VR, twice: once with virtual hands with a young appearance, in line with the actual participant age, and once with virtual hands with an old appearance, in contradiction with the actual participant age. The game plays a growing sequence of lights that the participant has to play back from memory by pressing buttons on the game wheel. The results show that when presented with older-looking hands, participants recalled shorter sequences and their hands did not reach as far as when presented with age-congruent hands. The study brings evidence of simultaneous cognitive and motor manipulation of VR user behavior. Specifically, the study shows that both the cognitive and motor behavior of young VR users can be shifted towards behavior commonly associated with older participants.