Research has consistently demonstrated that people treat digital technology-based environments such as VR as if they were real. This is consistent with neural reuse and predictive processing theories. Neural circuits that have developed to perform real world actions are reused when performing tasks in computer mediated environments. The current research investigates some of the factors that could support users in leveraging their existing real world representations. A reasonable hypothesis is that users are more likely to emulate existing real world processing if technological artifacts are congruent with their experiential basis. This work investigates the perceived cues of task risks, movement realism and effector realism in performing actions. Effector design is manipulated (gesturing, wand, vs. knife), and participants cut a vegetable in a simulated environment. Participants evoked real world sensory motor contingency when technological artifacts are congruent with their experiential basis.

The Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) is a well-known demonstration of the role of motor activity in the comprehension of language. Participants are asked to make sensibility judgments on sentences by producing movements toward the body or away from the body. The ACE is the finding that movements are faster when the direction of the movement (e.g., toward) matches the direction of the action in the to-be-judged sentence (e.g., Art gave you the pen describes action toward you). We report on a pre-registered, multi-lab replication of one version of the ACE. The results show that none of the 18 labs involved in the study observed a reliable ACE, and that the meta-analytic estimate of the size of the ACE was essentially zero.