Mateusz Wozniak

When we take control of a game character — Lara Croft, Geralt of Rivia, or any fighter in a combat game — something subtle shifts in our psychology. We start to identify with that character, and that identification has measurable effects on how our brain processes faces. In a series of studies, we used a simple setup: participants were assigned an unfamiliar face as their "avatar" and briefly interacted with it. What followed was a chain of surprising findings.

STUDY 1: WE ARE FASTER TO DETECT OUR AVATAR FACE

After just a short bout of avatar identification, participants became faster at categorizing stimuli associated with their avatar compared to stimuli associated with another person. This is the same "self-prioritization effect" that normally only our own real face produces. Just a few minutes of identification with an unfamiliar face was enough to trigger it.

Article: M. Woźniak & G. Knoblich (2019) "Self-prioritization of fully unfamiliar stimuli". Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 72(8), 2110–2120.

STUDY 2: OUR BRAIN PERCEIVES OUR AVATAR FACE SIMILARLY TO OUR REAL FACE...

We recorded EEG brain signals while participants viewed their avatar face and strangers' faces. The brain's response to the avatar closely resembled its response to the participant's own real face — and differed from the response to strangers. Avatar identification doesn't just speed up behaviour; it changes how the brain visually processes a face.

Article: M. Woźniak, D. Kourtis & G. Knoblich (2018) "Prioritization of arbitrary faces associated to self: An EEG study". PLoS ONE, 13(1), e0190679.

STUDY 3: ...BUT THESE SIMILARITIES ARE LIMITED

The avatar advantage in detecting faces is driven by a top-down, deliberate process of self-association. But our own real face also benefits from something much deeper: decades of unconscious familiarity built up from seeing ourselves in mirrors. We found that avatar identification replicates the first kind of advantage, but not the second. In other words, knowing something is "mine" helps — but it doesn't fully substitute for a lifetime of experience with your own face.

Article: M. Woźniak & J. Hohwy (2020) "Stranger to my face: top-down and bottom-up effects underlying prioritization of images of one's face". PLoS ONE, 15(7): e0235627.

STUDY 4: WHEN WE IDENTIFY WITH AN AVATAR FACE WE "ESTRANGE" OUR REAL FACE

Here things got unexpected. After participants identified with an avatar face, we tested how they perceived their own real face. We found that their perceptual representation of their own face had shifted — their real face felt subtly less "theirs". Avatar identification doesn't just add a new self: it actively reorganizes the existing one, causing a mild estrangement from one's own appearance.

Article: M. Woźniak, K. Friebe, G. Knoblich & L. Maister "Identifying with an avatar face changes perceptual representation of one's real face" (preprint)

STUDY 5: ...AND AVATAR SELF-IDENTIFICATION MIGHT BE ASSOCIATED WITH DEPERSONALIZATION

That sense of estrangement from one's own body is strikingly similar to depersonalization — a condition where people feel detached from themselves, as if watching their own life from the outside. We asked: do people who experience depersonalization show the same disrupted self-processing in the lab? We found that depersonalization specifically disrupted the advantage for participants' own face, while the advantage for abstract self-associated information (like a shape labelled "mine") stayed perfectly intact. The bodily self and the abstract self can come apart — and depersonalization targets one but not the other.

Article: M. Woźniak, L. McEllin, J. Hohwy & A. Ciaunica (2023) "Depersonalization affects self-prioritization of bodily, but not abstract self-related information". Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 49(11), 1447–1459.

Article: A. Ciaunica, L. McEllin, J. Kiverstein, V. Gallese, J. Hohwy & M. Woźniak (2022) "Zoomed out: digital media use and depersonalization experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown". Scientific Reports, 12(1), 3888.