Body-related effects of concurrent movement bias embodied choices.

Abstract

Human decision making often involves making a choice while concurrently moving. Prior studies showed that the dynamic body state biases choices, with deciders opting for choices associated with lower motor effort (motor cost bias) and spatial overlap with concurrent movement (cognitive crosstalk bias). In this study, we examined whether bodily movements (e.g., moving a limb) or resulting visual movements in the environment (e.g., a ball rolling in a specific direction due to the limb movement) give rise to the cognitive crosstalk bias. In a virtual embodied choice task, participants manually tracked a stimulus and concurrently made decisions to evade an obstacle and collect rewards. In two experiments, we orthogonally manipulated the motor costs for choices and spatial features of the body state during tracking. Importantly, we disentangled bodily movements during tracking and resulting visual movements on the computer screen to assess their relative contributions to the cognitive crosstalk bias. Both motor costs and cognitive crosstalk biased participants' choices. Cognitive crosstalk specifically was determined solely by the bodily movement direction in both experiments. This result pattern could not be attenuated by increasing the saliency of visual tracking movements on the computer screen in the second experiment. Our results suggest that bodily movements primarily cause cognitive crosstalk during embodied choices. These findings have implications for embodied choice models and dual-tasking research, as they show a potential divergence between findings from classical dual-task paradigms and more dynamic embodied choices that are influenced by motor costs and cognitive crosstalk resulting from the moving body. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).