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

ABSTRACT: Adults are known to identify their own body through a combination of multisensory cues and top-down expectations regarding its form, while children may possess a more flexible body representation. Here we use virtual reality to test how children and adults use form cues to feel ownership over a virtual hand with novel, varying degrees of corporeality and how a sense of ownership of the hand and movement fluency with it may be trained. In Experiment 1, children (N = 40, 6-8 years) and adults (N = 45) experienced four virtual hand forms (Hand, hand with a missing Thumb, crab-like Claw, Cross). Participants had to catch slowly moving virtual feathers while the virtual hand form moved in and out of synchrony with their own hand movements. In Experiment 2, we gave each child (N = 10, 6-9 years)

SUBMITTER: Dewe H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12819940 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature