15:00 - 16:30
Submission 266
Deciding while Moving: Body-Related Effects of Concurrent Movement Bias Embodied Choices
Posterwall-51
Presented by: Oliver Herbort
Philipp Raßbach 1, Eric Grießbach 2, 3, Rouwen Cañal-Bruland 2Oliver Herbort 1
1 University of Würzburg, Germany
2 University of Jena, Germany
3 Johns Hopkins University, United States
People often have to decide how to continue an already ongoing course of actions. For example, one may decide on which side to pass an obstacle while already walking toward it. In such situations, choices could be biased toward the potential actions with lower effort (motor cost bias) and the potential actions that overlap spatially with the ongoing movements (cognitive crosstalk bias). In this study, we examined whether choices during concurrent movement are affected by motor cost and cognitive crosstalk biases. Further, we examined whether body-related movements associated with potential actions (e.g., the direction of finger movements) or the resulting visual effects in the environment give rise to cognitive crosstalk biases. In two virtual embodied choice experiments, participants controlled the horizontal position of a cursor while occasionally making decisions about whether to evade oncoming obstacles on its left or right. We orthogonally manipulated the relationship between the cursor state and the motor costs required to circumvent an obstacle on either side, as well, as the relationship between the finger movements required to control the cursor and the resulting cursor movement on the screen. The results showed that both motor costs and cognitive crosstalk biased participants’ choices. The cognitive crosstalk bias was determined solely by the body-related movement direction. In summary, embodied choices during movements are biased toward actions with lower motor costs and toward actions in which body-related movements overlap spatially with the ongoing movement.