The Effect of an Adaptive Simulated Inner Voice on User's Eye-gaze Behaviour, Ownership Perception and Plausibility Judgement in Virtual Reality

Virtual cognitions (VCs) are a stream of simulated thoughts people hear while emerged in a virtual environment, e.g. by hearing a simulated inner voice presented as a voice over. They can enhance people’s self-efficacy and knowledge about, for example, social interactions as previous studies have shown. Ownership and plausibility of these VCs are regarded as important for their effect, and enhancing both might, therefore, be beneficial. A potential strategy for achieving this is the synchronization of the VCs with people’s eye fixation using eye-tracking technology embedded in a head-mounted display. Hence, this paper tests this idea in the context of a pre-therapy for spider and snake phobia to examine the ability to guide people’s eye fixation. An experiment with 24 participants was conducted using a within-subjects design. Each participant was exposed to two conditions: one where the VCs were adapted to eye gaze of the participant and the other where they were not adapted, i.e. the control condition. The findings of a Bayesian analysis suggest that credibly more ownership was reported and more eye-gaze shift behaviour was observed in the eye-gaze-adapted condition than in the control condition. Compared to the alternative of no or negative mediation, the findings also give some more credibility to the hypothesis that ownership, at least partly, positively mediates the effect eye-gaze-adapted VCs have on eye-gaze shift behaviour. Only weak support was found for plausibility as a mediator. These findings help improve insight into how VCs affect people.