HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article
Front. Syst. Neurosci.
This article is part of the Research TopicEmbodied interfaces: Human experience in virtual and mediated worldsView all 4 articles
Functional Sufficiency in VR: Achieving Non-Corporeal Embodiment
Provisionally accepted
- 1Massey University Business School, Albany, New Zealand
- 2Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, Adelaide University, Adelaide, Australia
- 3Kedge Business School, Marseille, France
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This article provides a novel functionalist account of embodiment in immersive virtual environments, grounded in a formal model of cognition, supported by past empirical evidence, and offering a testable framework for predicting when virtual experiences will produce cognitive and emotional effects. Our approach complements existing work on telepresence and subjective experience by applying the Thin Model as an intermediate theory linking interface affordances to perception, emotion, and behavior. Drawing on previously published immersive virtual reality studies, we show that when key functional elements - such as sensing, recognition, inspection, and feedback - are preserved, behavioral and emotional outcomes remain stable even when locomotion mechanisms differ. These findings support a criterion of functional sufficiency for embodiment where interface substitution leaves core policies of action unchanged. We outline a set of theory-driven tests to identify the limits of this invariance and argue that embodiment should be defined by the integrity of the perception–action loop, not by anatomical mimicry.
Keywords: Ecological Validity, embodiment, Functional Sufficiency, Immersive Virtual Reality, mental simulation, multisensory integration, perception-action loop, Telepresence
Received: 31 Dec 2025; Accepted: 06 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Wright, Petit and Schnack. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Malcolm Wright
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