The sense of a bodily self is thought to depend on adaptive weighting and integration of bodily afferents and prior beliefs. Evidence from studies using paradigms such as the rubber hand illusion and full body illusion suggests changes in the integration of visuotactile bodily signals throughout childhood. Here, we extended this line of research by assessing how bottom-up visuomotor synchrony and expectancy, modulated by visual appearance of virtual avatars, contribute to embodiment in children. We compared responses to a first-person perspective virtual full body illusion from 8- to 12-year-old children and adults while manipulating synchrony of the avatar’s movements (synchronous, 0.5-s delay, or 1-s delay compared with the participant’s movements) and appearance of the avatar (human or skeleton). We measured embodiment with both subjective questionnaires and objective skin conductance responses to virtual threat. Results showed that children experienced ownership for the virtual avatar in a similar way as adults, which was reduced with increasing asynchrony, and for the skeleton avatar as compared with the human avatar. This modulation of ownership was not reflected in the skin conductance responses, which were equally high in all experimental conditions and only showed a modulation of repetition by age. In contrast, in children the subjective experience of agency was less affected by the dampening effects of visuomotor asynchrony or reduced human likeness and was overall higher. These findings suggest that children can easily embody a virtual avatar but that different aspects of embodiment develop at different rates, which could have important implications for applications of embodied virtual reality.

身体自我的感觉被认为取决于身体传入和先验信念的适应性加权和整合。使用橡胶手错觉和全身错觉等范式的研究证据表明，整个儿童时期视觉触觉身体信号的整合发生了变化。在这里，我们通过评估由虚拟化身的视觉外观调节的自下而上的视觉运动同步性和预期如何有助于儿童的体现来扩展这一研究领域。我们比较了对 8 到 12 岁儿童和成人的第一人称视角虚拟全身错觉的反应，同时操纵化身运动的同步（同步、0.5 秒延迟或与参与者的运动相比延迟 1 秒） ) 和头像（人类或骨骼）的外观。我们通过主观问卷和对虚拟威胁的客观皮肤电导反应来测量具体化。结果表明，儿童以与成年人相似的方式体验虚拟化身的所有权，随着异步性的增加而减少，而与人类化身相比，骨架化身的所有权会减少。这种所有权的调制并未反映在皮肤电导反应中，在所有实验条件下都同样高，并且仅显示出随年龄而重复的调制。相比之下，在儿童中，能动性的主观体验受视觉运动不同步或人类相似度降低的抑制作用的影响较小，并且总体上较高。这些发现表明，儿童可以轻松体现虚拟化身，但具体化的不同方面以不同的速度发展，