Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We explore pupil diameter (PD) as estimator of Sense of Embodiment (SoE) using data of three user studies. We hypothesize that pupil diameter reflects SoE in a direct and indirect way. If individuals feel strongly embodied, presenting an emotional stimulus like a threat to the surrogate will produce a strong response, as if the stimulus would be presented to their own body. This would lead to a positive correlation between SoE and pupil dilation during the presentation of emotional stimuli. Besides this direct effect, there may also be an indirect effect. It is postulated that higher degrees of embodiment reduce workload when controlling a surrogate. This indirect effect of embodiment through lower workload on the PD would result in a negative correlation between SoE and PD since lower workload results in smaller PD. These direct and indirect effects were partially confirmed by the results of three experiments. We observed that PD and SoE are positive and direct correlated in case of emotional stimuli subjected to the surrogate (e.g. a threat), and that PD tended to be smaller for participants who experienced a condition designed to provide high SoE compared to one designed to provide low SoE.