Self as a feature bundle: Unraveling the mechanisms underlying self-representation

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Based on a developed version of the theory of event coding (TEC), we suggest that people represent themselves and others just like other, non--social events. We will use virtual reality to test three assumptions of our approach: whether people are more likely to integrate representations of themselves and of others if there is more feature-overlap between self and other, if overlapping feature dimensions are primed by current task relevance, and whether people have cognitive control over the degree to which self-other integration takes place. 13 experiments are planned to test these assumptions, three in collaboration with other groups. Participants will be confronted with avatars in virtual space that share either many or few features with them, and they will be able to control the behavior of the avatar to different degrees. Predictions are that perceived agency, ownership, and the migration of features between avatar and participant, such as mood or gender stereotypes, will be enhanced if the behavior of the avatar is synchronized with the behavior of the participant, if the feature overlap is more pronounced, if the overlapping features are made relevant by task demands, and if the metacontrol state of the participant is biased towards an integrative state.