A connectionist explanation of presence in virtual environments
type: CreativeWork
description: Presence has various definitions, but can be understood as the sensation that a virtual environment is a real place, that the user is actually in the virtual environment rather than at the display terminal, or that the medium used to display the environment has disappeared leaving only the environment itself. We present an attempt to unite various presence approaches by reducing each to what we believe is a common basis – the psychology of behaviour selection and control – and re-conceptualizing presence in these terms by defining cognitive presence – the mental state where the VE rather than the real environment is acting as the basis for behaviour selection. The bulk of this work represents the construction of a three-layer connectionist model to explain and predict this concept of cognitive presence. This model takes input from two major sources: the perceptual modalities of the user (bottom-up processes), and the mental state of the user (top-down processes). These two basic sources of input competitively spread activation to a central layer which competitively determines which behaviour script will be applied to regulate behaviour. We demonstrate the ability of the model to cope with current notions of presence by using it to successfully predict two published findings: one (Hendrix & Barfield, 1995) showing that presence increases with an increase in the geometric field of view of the graphical display, and another (Salln?s, 1999), which demonstrates the positive relationship between presence and the stimulation of more than one sensory modality. Apart from this theoretical analysis, we also perform two experiments to test the central tenets of our model. The first experiment aimed to show that presence is affected by both perceptual inputs (bottom-up processes), conceptual inputs (top-down processes), and the interaction of these. We collected 103 observations from a 2x2 factorial design with stimulus quality (2 levels) and conceptual priming (2 levels) as in…
abstract: Presence has various definitions, but can be understood as the sensation that a virtual environment is a real place, that the user is actually in the virtual environment rather than at the display terminal, or that the medium used to display the environment has disappeared leaving only the environment itself. We present an attempt to unite various presence approaches by reducing each to what we believe is a common basis – the psychology of behaviour selection and control – and re-conceptualizing presence in these terms by defining cognitive presence – the mental state where the VE rather than the real environment is acting as the basis for behaviour selection. The bulk of this work represents the construction of a three-layer connectionist model to explain and predict this concept of cognitive presence. This model takes input from two major sources: the perceptual modalities of the user (bottom-up processes), and the mental state of the user (top-down processes). These two basic sources of input competitively spread activation to a central layer which competitively determines which behaviour script will be applied to regulate behaviour. We demonstrate the ability of the model to cope with current notions of presence by using it to successfully predict two published findings: one (Hendrix & Barfield, 1995) showing that presence increases with an increase in the geometric field of view of the graphical display, and another (Salln?s, 1999), which demonstrates the positive relationship between presence and the stimulation of more than one sensory modality. Apart from this theoretical analysis, we also perform two experiments to test the central tenets of our model. The first experiment aimed to show that presence is affected by both perceptual inputs (bottom-up processes), conceptual inputs (top-down processes), and the interaction of these. We collected 103 observations from a 2x2 factorial design with stimulus quality (2 levels) and conceptual priming (2 levels) as in…
author: Nunez, David
language: eng
date published: 2003
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:23:16Z
provider: University of Cape Town
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Department of Computer Science

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/17378