Homuncular Flexibility: The Human Ability to Inhabit Nonhuman Avatars

Evidence demonstrates neural plasticity in nature; for example, amputees experience cortical shifting such that their face receives extra attention in the brain after a limb is amputated. 

Experiments such as the rubber hand illusion, in which people respond to rubber hands placed near their arms as if they were their actual hands, demonstrated that a person’s sense of their body can be adjusted to include external objects.

Homuncular Flexibility is a paradigm in which physical motions are transformed by remapping degrees of freedom from tracked movements onto an avatar.