Excitation Transfer Across Displays of Different Immersive Quality: Investigating the Temporal Dynamics of Intra-Stimulus Arousal Escalation and Decay

Abstract

ABSTRACT With the mainstreaming of virtual reality and 360° video, media consumption will increasingly include engaging with highly immersive messages alongside more traditional media formats. That means users will need to potentially switch back and forth between highly immersive and relatively non-immersive media messages. However, little is yet known about how transitioning between drastically different immersion levels may affect the cognitive and emotional processing of those messages. This paper presents the first study to examine the nature of excitation transfer effects during transitions across media technologies of different immersive quality. We find support for the existence of transfer of arousal elicited by an initial immersive message (T1 stimulus) to the arousal response elicited by a subsequent non-immersive media experience (T2 stimulus). However, physiological arousal at T2 did not linearly increase with the level of message immersion at T1. Additionally, intra-stimulus patterns suggest excitation escalation and decay during T1 could influence inherent arousal response to the T2 stimulus, highlighting the importance of an analytic strategy that allows for an examination of how excitation transfer dynamically unfolds. Implications and future research directions related to the psychological processing of sequences of messages, particularly those of varied levels of technological immersion, are discussed.