Avatar embodiment: from cognitive self-representation to digital body ownership

Introduction: the cognitive take on avatar immersion and embodiment 1 Present-day virtual reality experiences predominantly make use of user-avatars designed to enhance their immersive potential.The mental processes at work in what Perény (2015) has described as avatar immersion-or "avatar embodiment," in the sense of being incarnated in a virtual body-are crucial to understating how the appropriation of a digital body plays out.In this paper, avatar immersion is defined as a user's ability to forget their avatar, viewed as a transparent vehicle for actions and motor sensations.This first concept is usefully supplemented by the notion of avatar embodiment, applicable whenever the mind processes the properties of the virtual body in the same way as those of the physical body (Kilteni et al., 2012).A successful embodiment in a virtual entity hence relies on the subject's ability to coordinate her cognitive self-representation with the modeled representation of the digitally simulated body at her disposal.These two representations fall in line in the presence of a phenomenon described as the transfer of the individual's body schema and body image onto the digital representation of the virtual body (Biocca, 1997).This cognitive transfer of mental representations of the body lets the subject identify and accept the virtual body as an integral part of her corporeality, as defined in reference to Amato's "own body" (2008). 2These phenomena raise the following question: how can the user improve her sense of virtual immersion when inhabiting a virtual body perceived as pertaining to her own?Avatar embodiment: from cognitive self-representation to digital body ownership Hybrid, 9 | 2022Embodied cognition is a school of thought based on a wide-ranging multidisciplinary research program that draws from work in psychology, neuroscience, ethology, philosophy, linguistics, robotics, and artificial intelligence.Since the 1960s, in the field of psychology, a certain branch of literature has drawn a distinction between cold, purely functional cognition and so-called hot cognition, which takes into account the affective dimension of cognitive processes (Lepper, 1994).Embodied cognition combines these two aspects by considering the role of the body in cognitive processes, and vice versa (Wilson & Foglia, 2013), hence challenging computationalism's view that the brain, as a biological computer, is the seat of cognition, independent from the body.Closer to embodied cognition is enactivism, which considers that cognition emerges from, or is constituted by, sensorimotor activity.Cognition is generated and specified by sensorimotor processes rooted in interactions between the brain, the body, and the world (Varela et al., 2017).Enactivsm holds that perception consists in an active exploration of the environment, which establishes patterns of dependence between our movements, sensory states, and the world.Perceivers need not build and manipulate internal models of the external world.Instead, they need only skillfully exploit sensorimotor dependences that their exploratory activities reveal.The paradigm of embodied cognition states that: many features of cognition are embodied in that they are deeply dependent upon characteristics of the physical body of an agent, such that the agent's beyond-the-brain body plays a significant causal role, or a physically constitutive role, in that agent's cognitive processing.(Shapiro & Spaulding, 2021, p. 1) Embodied cognition stresses the importance of the body in cognitive processes.Cognition is a phenomenon that emerges from the body, which receives proprioceptive Avatar embodiment: from cognitive self-representation to digital body ownership Hybrid, 9 | 2022