The Perceptual Dominance Effect Of Online Game Avatars

The Avatar-prioritization effect refers to the phenomenon that individuals respond faster or better to information related to their own avatars.Although some previous studies demonstrated that avatar information has some processing advantages in perception and memory(Qi,Zou,Peng,& Wang,2023;Cao,Min et al.,2021),as an emerging research topic,the avatar-prioritization effect still has some unanswered questions,such as whether players will consider avatars as important as their true selves after incorporating them into their self-concept,and whether the nature of the avatar-prioritization effect is the same as the self-prioritization effect? Therefore,in order to research this issue,the present study tested the relevant hypotheses in four experiments by adopting the self-associative learning approach.Experiment 1 using the self-associative learning approach(Sui,Liu,Wang & Han,2009;Sui,He & Humphreys,2012),the reaction time and accuracy rate of players and non-player subjects to their own,avatars and celebrity names were investigated to test the avatar advantages’ phenomenon of different types of subjects.The results showed that there was an avatar advantage effect in player subjects,and there was the overlap between their identities and avatars.However,this result was not reflected in the non-player subjects.This shows that the superiority effect of avatar is not caused by the temporary representation of stimulus familiarity and appreciation or curiosity of avatar,but by the correlation between avatar and self.In Experiment 2,a stimulus contrast condition was introduced(Braet & Humphreys,2007).We found that players’ avatar-prioritization effect were similar to the ego dominance effect,and there is also some instability in the presence of changes in stimulus contrast.On this basis,in Experiment 3,we attempted to separate the virtual from the reality under stimulus contrast changes.It was found that players showed stable prioritization effects in response to avatar information and also showed friend-prioritization effects for virtual teammates,which were consistent with those of real friends.Instead,when mixing real and virtual characters(Experiment 4),players’ the avatar-prioritization effect were disturbed.The experiment results showed that the avatar-prioritization effect was easily disturbed by the reality factor when attention resources were limited,and players still differentiated between their real and virtual selves(avatar)and reflected in the form of behavioral responses when they were dealt with both simultaneously.This implies that the avatar-prioritization effect is fundamentally different from the self-prioritization effect in that people fail to consider the avatar as equally important as the ego after incorporating it into the self-concept.And the avatar may be a role between the ego and the friend that the friend that influences perception.