The sociomotor framework outlines a possible role of social action effects on human action control, suggesting that anticipated partner reactions are a major cue to represent, select, and initiate own body movements. Here, we review studies that elucidate the actual content of social action representations and that explore factors that can distinguish action control processes involving social and inanimate action effects. Specifically, we address two hypotheses on how the social context can influence effect-based action control: first, by providing unique social (...) features such as body-related, anatomical codes, and second, by orienting attention towards any relevant feature dimensions of the action effects. The reviewed empirical work presents a surprisingly mixed picture: while there is indirect evidence for both accounts, previous studies that directly addressed the anatomical account showed no signs of the involvement of genuinely social features in sociomotor action control. Furthermore, several studies show evidence against the differentiation of social and non-social action effect processing, portraying sociomotor action representations as remarkably non-social. A focus on enhancing the social experience in future studies should, therefore, complement the current database to establish whether such settings give rise to the hypothesized influence of social context. (shrink)

Today, avatars often represent users in digital worlds such as in video games or workplace applications. Avatars embody the user and perform their actions in these artificial environments. As a result, users sometimes develop the feeling that their self merges with their avatar. The user realizes that they are the avatar, but the avatar is also the user—meaning that avatar’s appearance, character, and actions also affect their self. In the present paper, we first introduce the event-coding approach of the self (...) and then argue based on the reviewed literature on human-avatar interaction that a self-controlled avatar can lead to avatar-self merging: the user sets their own goals in the virtual environment, plans and executes the avatar’s actions, and compares the predicted with the actual motion outcomes of the avatar. This makes the user feel body ownership and agency over the avatar’s action. Following the event-coding account, avatar-self merging should not be seen as an all-or-nothing process, but rather as a continuous process to which various factors contribute, including successfully taking the perspective of the avatar. Against this background, we discuss affective, cognitive, and visuo-spatial perspective taking of the avatar. As evidence for avatar-self merging, we present findings showing that when users take the avatar’s perspective, they can show spontaneous behavioral tendencies that run counter to their own. (shrink)

Objects which a human agent controls by efferent activities can be perceived by the agent as belonging to his or her body. This suggests that what an agent counts as “body” is plastic, depending on what she or he controls. Yet there are possible limitations for such momentary plasticity. One of these limitations is that sensations stemming from the body and sensations stemming from objects outside the body are not integrated if they do not sufficiently “match”. What “matches” and what (...) does not is conceivably determined by long–term experience with the perceptual changes that body movements typically produce. Children have accumulated less sensorimotor experience than adults have. Consequently, they express higher flexibility to integrate body-internal and body-external signals, independent of their “match” as suggested by rubber hand illusion studies. However, children’s motor performance in tool use is more affected by mismatching body-internal and body-external action effects than that of adults, possibly because of less developed means to overcome such mismatches. We review research on perception-action interactions, multisensory integration, and developmental psychology to build bridges between these research fields. By doing so, we account for the flexibility of the sense of body ownership for actively controlled events and its development through ontogeny. This gives us the opportunity to validate the suggested mechanisms for generating ownership by investigating their effects in still developing and incomplete stages in children. We suggest testable predictions for future studies investigating both body ownership and motor skills throughout the lifespan. (shrink)

A theory is proposed that views emotional feelings as pivotal for action control. Feelings of emotions are valued interoceptive signals from the body that become multimodally integrated with perceptual contents from registered and mentally simulated events. During the simulation of a perceptual change from one event to the next, a conative feeling signal is created that codes for the wanting of a specific perceptual change. A wanted perceptual change is weighted more strongly than alternatives, increasing its activation level on the (...) cognitive level and that of associated motor structures that produced this perceptual change in the past. As a consequence, a tendency for action is generated that is directed at the production of the wanted perception. (shrink)