The subjective experience of embodying an avatar when immersed in virtual reality (VR) is known to support the sense of presence and to help with the interaction in a virtual environment. Virtual embodiment is often thought of as the consequence of replacement of the physical body by a virtual one, with a sense of agency for the avatar obtained by making the avatar’s body follow the user’s movements. This unidirectional motor link was, however, challenged by studies observing the opposite effect under different circumstances, for example, in a slow-motion context or when an arm movement was snapped on a predefined axis. These reports are, however, still rare or anecdotal. With the idea of a generalized bidirectional relationship between the user and the avatar in mind, we established a methodology to systematically provoke and study the circumstances under which participants follow the movements of their avatar during long repetitive movements without having been instructed to do so. A preliminary study confirmed that our virtual experimental setup, using full-body motion capture, avatar animation, and virtual mirrors, supports a strong sense of agency and body ownership for the avatar while enabling the experimental manipulation of the avatar’s movement. In the main experimental study, where participants performed repetitive upper- and lower-body movements while their avatar animations were either congruent or out-of-phase, we observed that almost all participants synchronized with their avatar at least once, for ∼47% of trials for lower limb movements and ∼38% for upper limb movements. Participants still reported low agency and ownership for the avatar under the incongruent condition, but, most interestingly, some of them also reported that their movements were not influenced by the avatar despite the behavioral effect. Our methodological approach and results contribute to the characterization of the conditions of occurrence of the self-avatar follower effect and, thereby, to identifying an enriched interaction design for VR, involving complex avatar–user mutual interdependencies.

The perception of one’s own body is a complex mechanism that can be disturbed by conflicting sensory information and lead to illusory (mis-) perceptions. Prominent models of multisensory integration propose that sensory streams are integrated according to their reliability by approximating Bayesian inference. As such, when considering self-attribution of seen motor actions, previous works argue in favor of visual dominance over other sensations, and internal cues. In the present work, we use virtual reality and a haptic glove to investigate the influence of an active haptic feedback on one’s visual and agency judgments over a performed finger action under experimentally manipulated visual and haptic feedbacks. Data overall confirm that vision dominates for agency judgment in conditions of multisensory conflict. Interestingly, we also show that participants’ visual judgment over their finger action is sensitive to multisensory conflicts (vision, proprioception, motor afferent signals, and haptic perception), thus bringing an important nuance to the widely accepted view on a general visual dominance.