How Realistic Should Avatars Be?

摘要: . Increased interaction with characters in games and online necessitates a better understanding of how different characteristics of these agents impact media users. This paper investigates a possible neurological underpinning for a common research finding – namely, that animated characters designed to be comparatively more human, more real, and more similar to the people they represent elicit more positive self-reported evaluations. The goal of this study was to examine the extent to which these results might be due to differential processing of character features in brain networks recruited for face recognition. There is some evidence that parts of the face network may be specifically tuned for real human faces. An experiment was conducted where participants viewed photographs of faces of actual agents (humans and animals) or colored drawings of matched agents (cartoon humans and animals). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure blood oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) activation in the whole brain and specifically in the face network, we investigated the variation in patterns of activation with human and animal faces that were more or less real. The results were consistent with previous reports that the core regions of the face network are sensitive to the humanness of faces. However, our results extended previous work by showing that regions of the core and extended regions of the face network – and some regions outside the network – were sensitive to realism, but only realism of human faces.