Abstract
Presence, flow, narrative absorption, immersion, transportation, and similar subjective phenomena are studied in many different disciplines, mostly in relation to mediated experiences (books, film, VR, games). Moreover, since real, virtual, or fictional agents are often involved, concepts like identification and state empathy are often linked to engaging media use. Based on a scoping review which identified similarities in the wording of various questionnaire items conceived to measure different phenomena, we categorize items into the most relevant psychological aspects, and use this categorization to propose an interdisciplinary systematization. Then, based on a framework of embodied predictive processing, we present a new cognitive model of presence-related phenomena for mediated and non-mediated experiences, integrating spatial and temporal aspects and also considering the role of fiction and media design. Key processes described within the model are: selective attention, enactment of intentions, and interoception. We claim that presence is the state of perceived successful agency of an embodied mind able to correctly enact its predictions. The difference between real-life and simulated experiences (“book problem,” “paradox of fiction”) lays in the different precision weighing of exteroceptive and interoceptive signals.
Highlights
Many different disciplines have studied how technology mediates experience, in particular cultural and aesthetic ones, like reading a book, watching a film, or playing a game in virtual reality
Some of these concepts have been primarily introduced for activities not necessarily related to the mediation of cultural and technological artefacts; some others have been introduced in relation to a specific technology, and have been later acknowledged to be broader psychological phenomena not necessarily linked to the experience of a medium (Coelho et al, 2012; Mantovani & Riva, 1999)
We focus on a few mediated experiences with virtual reality (VR) and written narrative to exemplify how predictive processing can effectively explain the cognitive and affective processes related to presence, narrative absorption, and flow
Summary
2. Julian Kiverstein , Amsterdam University Medical Centre, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Any reports and responses or comments on the article can be found at the end of the article. This article is included in the Excellent Science gateway. This article is included in the The Mind, Mental Health, and Behaviour collection. We’ve made corrections to improve syntax correctness. We’ve modified parts of section 5.2 and section 5.3, prompted by one of the reviewers (Kiverstein), to make clear their importance for the whole argumentation. We removed a wrong reference to the preprint of our article, we updated reference details for a couple of other articles, we added one reference (Kuiken & Douglas, 2017) in which readers can find another theory about the concept of “peripersonal space” and narrative
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