Observing effects of attention on presence with fMRI

Presence is one of the goals of many virtual reality systems. Historically, in the context of virtual reality, the concept of presence has been associated much with spatial perception (bottom up process) as its informal definition of “feeling of being there” suggests. However, recent studies in presence have challenged this view and attempted to widen the concept to include psychological immersion, thus linking more high level elements (processed in a top down fashion) to presence such as story and plots, flow, attention and focus, identification with the characters, emotion, etc. In this paper, we experimentally studied the relationship between two content elements, each representing the two axis of the presence dichotomy, perceptual cues for spatial presence and sustained attention for (psychological) immersion. Our belief was that spatial perception or presence and a top down processed concept such as voluntary attention have only a very weak relationship, thus our experimental...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: VRST
• Authors: Sungkil Lee, Gerard Jounghyun Kim, Janghan Lee
• Keywords: Spatial Presence, Sustained Attention, Virtual Reality, VRST 2004