First-person Perspective Research Articles

The Audience is All in (or Not): Perceptions of the Affordances of Journalistic 360° Video

ABSTRACT This study shows how the affordances of journalistic 360° video shape and interact with audience perceptions. 360° video is a form of immersive journalism that allows news to be experienced from a first-person perspective while surrounded by a digital space, with the goal of achieving immersion. It is asked how low-level affordances (i.e., storytelling elements of immersive journalism) are perceived and connected to imagined affordances of 360° video, as well as high-level affordances (i.e., communicative outcomes). In-depth interviews were conducted with 37 German news consumers between the ages of 23 and 80, who were shown two videos on different topics and with two headsets of different sophistication. The study found that the low-level affordances of navigating the self in the story (use of a virtual body, direct address) were often perceived as confusing. Moreover, the use of the spatial narrative (use of the 360° space, unusual perspectives) clashed with interviewees' ideas of how journalism should be presented. The high-level affordance of immersion was achieved nevertheless; however, fears of manipulation were expressed. When the immersion was successful, interviewees felt as they were active participants in the digital world. All in all, careful tailoring of storytelling can help create fruitful immersive journalistic experiences.

Art therapy and brain injury: making the invisible visible

The multiple cognitive, somatic, and behavioral changes following head injuries can result in expressive language difficulties that may not be resolved quickly. This paper explores the traumatic brain injury and post-concussive syndrome artwork created by an art therapist and the child of an art therapist, making the invisible neurological consequences of head injuries visible. Our first-person and caregiver perspectives offer examples of visual arts-based communication between patients, health professionals, and family members. Utilizing client imagery as a form of communication may improve patient outcomes through the identification and resultant treatment of overlooked and underdiagnosed symptoms. Experiences such as confusion, fear, localized pain, and mood lability stem not only from the injury itself, but from the experience of damaged microstructures that are often undetectable in standard diagnostic testing. Additionally, symptoms such as temperature and appetite dysregulation, vestibular and proprioceptive disruptions, and circadian rhythm sleep disorders evade standard diagnostic inventories. This may prompt the patient to question the reality of their somatic and cognitive experiences. Research supports the position of the authors: these experiences can be communicated through client imagery, expediting healing and improving overall health. In the spontaneously created art traversing child and adult stages of development, we discovered multiple prevalent themes within the imagery too numerous to ignore. Practice recommendations will be discussed for both art therapists and interprofessional healthcare collaborators concerning the use of imagery and visual expression when working with those who have sustained traumatic brain injuries.

The Comic Adaptation of Lao She’s Short Story “Vision”: A Critical Analysis

Abstract The short story “Vision” stands as a singular romantic narrative within Lao She’s (1899–1966) literary repertoire. Wang Shupeng undertook the adaptation of this tale into gouache comic strips, a rendition that garnered acclaim by securing the Second Prize in the Third National Comic Strip Painting and Creation Contest in China in 1986. Lao She held a particular fondness for this narrative, as it drew inspiration from his own experiences of first love. Adopting a first-person perspective, the author elegantly narrated a tale of love imbued with tragedy, employing a poetic language and employing a stream-of-consciousness narrative technique that underscored its creative ingenuity. In adapting the script for the comic strip rendition, Wang Shupeng accentuated the poignant fate of the protagonists alongside their unwavering perseverance. Through his evocative brushwork, the artist adeptly conveyed the characters’ distinct personalities and internal thoughts, thereby setting a gloomy tonal ambiance for the comic strip’s color palette. Such meticulous efforts culminated in the transformation of “Vision” into a masterpiece within the realm of comic strips.

Pharmacy students’ learning of real patients in a simple first-person perspective patient simulation exercise — A qualitative analysis

Pharmacy students’ learning of real patients in a simple first-person perspective patient simulation exercise — A qualitative analysis

The Contested Value of Life.

Putting a specific value on human life is important in many contexts and forms part of the basis for many political, administrative, commercial, and personal decisions. Sometimes, the value is set explicitly, sometimes even in monetary terms, but much more often, it is set implicitly through a decision that allows us to calculate the valuation of a life implicit in a certain rule or a certain resource allocation. We also value lives in what looks like a completely different way when we evaluate whether a particular life is being or has been lived well. Both of these ways of valuing are done from an outside or third-person perspective, but there is also a third way of valuing a life which is from the first-person perspective, and which essentially asks how much my life is worth to me. Is there any connection between these different ways of valuing life, and if so what is the connection between them? This paper provides an account of John Harris' analysis of the value of life and discusses whether it can bridge the gap between first-person and third-person evaluations of the value of life, and whether it can do so in a way that still allows for resource allocation decisions to be made in health care and other sectors.

Eyes full of stories: the interaction effect of gaze direction and narrative perspective in charitable advertisements

While the portrayal of recipients in charitable advertisements prevails in practice and has garnered research attention, there remains a lack of investigation into the impact of recipients’ gazes. This research focuses on two forms of gaze—direct gaze and averted gaze—in charitable advertisements, aiming to explore the interaction effects between gazes, narratives (first-person and third-person perspectives), and urgency of causes in these advertisements. We conducted three online experiments (N = 964) and performed ANOVA and bootstrap analysis to investigate these effects. The results revealed that direct (averted) gazes exhibited by recipients can enhance advertisement effectiveness when ad appeal is narrated from a first-person (third-person) perspective, which is mediated by perceived sincerity and subjective socioeconomic status. Besides, this interaction effect of gazes and narrative perspectives is effective when project information is non-urgent (but not urgent). The findings provide novel implications that guide managers and advertisers to tailor charitable advertisements to align with recipients’ gazes available.

Gameplay 2.0: Toward a New Theory

The aim of this article is to present an updated version of our previous theory of gameplay. “Gameplay” is a term often used without a clear definition or consistent application. In this article, we propose categorizing gameplay into three distinct yet interconnected layers: the first emphasizing temporality, the second highlighting spatiality, and the third pinpointing emotion as anchor point. Our model and understanding are influenced by the philosophy of phenomenology, particularly Husserl's objective examination of the first-person perspective in perceptual experience—a commendable approach for blending formalism with real-time experience without resorting to subjectivism or psychologism. We offer an analytical and methodological framework for understanding gameplay, relying on micro-tensions to elucidate gameplay as a structural entity as well as an experiential phenomenon. As we shall demonstrate, micro-tensions are present within each of the three layers, paving the way for the entirety of gameplay—referred to by gamers as “great gameplay.”

How We See Changes How We Feel: Investigating the Effect of Visual Point-of-View on Decision-Making in VR Environments

Virtual reality (VR) can immerse users into engaging experiences, affording opportunities to study behaviour in simulated contexts such as decision-making processes. However, methodological research into designing meaningful VR experiences - experiences that promote appreciation and deeper understanding of a work - is still underdeveloped. In this two-part study, we investigate how visual point-of-view (POV) in VR impacts feelings of meaningfulness and empathy as well as objective decision-making processes. Our study revolves around a VR application that situates users in moral dilemmas from three different POVs. Data from the choices made is augmented with self-reported subjective data. We find that, from different POVs, users' subjective feelings do show change; users show greater empathy for virtual agents and have an increasingly meaningful experience from a first-person perspective, even if this is not always reflected in changes in their decisions. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings in the context of VR application design.

Vahagn: VisuAl Haptic Attention Gate Net for slip detection.

Slip detection is crucial for achieving stable grasping and subsequent operational tasks. A grasp action is a continuous process that requires information from multiple sources. The success of a specific grasping maneuver is contingent upon the confluence of two factors: the spatial accuracy of the contact and the stability of the continuous process. In this paper, for the task of perceiving grasping results using visual-haptic information, we propose a new method for slip detection, which synergizes visual and haptic information from spatial-temporal dual dimensions. Specifically, the method takes as input a sequence of visual images from a first-person perspective and a sequence of haptic images from a gripper. Then, it extracts time-dependent features of the whole process and spatial features matching the importance of different parts with different attention mechanisms. Inspired by neurological studies, during the information fusion process, we adjusted temporal and spatial information from vision and haptic through a combination of two-step fusion and gate units. To validate the effectiveness of method, we compared it with traditional CNN net and models with attention. It is anticipated that our method achieves a classification accuracy of 93.59%, which is higher than that of previous works. Attention visualization is further presented to support the validity.

Turns around periodic spatial boundaries facilitate increasing event segmentation over time.

Event segmentation is a neurocognitive process bridging perception and episodic memory. To our knowledge, almost all segmentation work is framed towards humans, yet evolutionarily conserved mechanisms in event cognition exist across species. Here, we addressed segmentation in a way that is applicable to humans and non-human animals, inspired by research in rats; specifically, the fragmentation of grid-cell spatial representations following the insertion of boundaries into an environment (forming a corridor maze). Participants indicated when they felt a meaningful unit of activity ended and another began, while watching an agent traverse from a first-person perspective. A virtual corridor maze (experiment 1) and two other mazes were used (experiment 2), with participants viewing/segmenting the same stimuli twice. We found that people segmented more during turns relative to corridors, with elevated segmentation occurring in discrete moments around turns. Interestingly, we also found that boundaries of the corridor maze facilitated an increase in segmentation within and across viewings. These results suggest that segmentation can be driven by recognized repeating activity that can become more meaningful over time, highlighting an important link between event segmentation and pattern separation that is relevant to many species in their formation of episodic-(like) memory.

Cross-species Perception and Ecological Disposition in Animation

Studies on environmental animations have explored the politics of world-making and the interdependence of humans and animals. Taking as a case study the short Hungarian animation A Légy (Ferenc Rófusz, 1980), this article explores ways that animation can foster an ecological disposition in the viewer by presenting the worldview of a housefly from a first-person perspective. A Légy focuses on altersubjectivity, a term that Vinciane Despret (‘Ethology between empathy, standpoint and perspectivism’, 2010) uses to describe Jakob von Uexküll’s practice of adopting the animals’ perspectives. Because each species is attuned to its particular dwelling-world, Von Uexküll ( A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with a Theory of Meaning, 2010) suggests, we must study animals by examining the features available to them by erecting ‘a bubble’ around them. A Légy gestures toward this idea by facilitating a becoming-animal that highlights perceptual similarities and differences between the viewer and the animated insect. The animation machine enables a ‘cross-species perception’, a form of perception that extends the spectator’s perceptual awareness of the nonhuman worldview.

Evaluating the Value of Eye-Tracking Augmented Debriefing in Medical Simulation-A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial.

Debriefing after simulation facilitates reflective thinking and learning. Eye-tracking augmented debriefing (ETAD) may provide advantages over traditional debriefing (TD) by leveraging video replay with first-person perspective. This multisite randomized controlled trial compared the impact of ETAD with TD (without eye-tracking and without video) after simulation on 4 outcomes: (1) resident metacognitive awareness (the primary outcome), (2) cognitive load (CL) of residents and debriefers, (3) alignment of resident self-assessment and debriefer assessment scores, and (4) resident and debriefer perceptions of the debriefing experience. Fifty-four emergency medicine residents from 2 institutions were randomized to the experimental (ETAD) or the control (TD) arm. Residents completed 2 simulation stations followed by debriefing. Before station 1 and after station 2, residents completed a Metacognition Awareness Inventory (MAI). After each station, debriefers and residents rated their CL and completed an assessment of performance. After the stations, residents were interviewed and debriefers participated in a focus group. There were no statistically significant differences in mean MAI change, resident CL, or assessment alignment between residents and debriefers. Debriefer CL was lower in the experimental arm. Interviews identified 4 themes: (1) reflections related to debriefing approach, (2) eye-tracking as a metacognitive sensitizer, (3) translation of metacognition to practice, and (4) ETAD as a strategy to manage CL. Residents reported that eye tracking improved the specificity of feedback. Debriefers relied less on notes, leveraged video timestamps, appreciated the structure of the eye-tracking video, and found the video useful when debriefing poor performers. There were no significant quantitative differences in MAI or resident CL scores; qualitative findings suggest that residents appreciated the benefits of the eye-tracking video review. Debriefers expended less CL and reported less perceived mental effort with the new technology. Future research should leverage longitudinal experimental designs to further understand the impact of eye-tracking facilitated debriefing.

Investigating Creation Perspectives and Icon Placement Preferences for On-Body Menus in Virtual Reality

On-body menus present a novel interaction paradigm within Virtual Reality (VR) environments by embedding virtual interfaces directly onto the user’s body. Unlike traditional screen-based interfaces, on-body menus enable users to interact with virtual options or icons visually attached to their physical form. In this paper, We investigated the impact of the creation process on the effectiveness of on-body menus, comparing first-person, third-person, and mirror perspectives. Our first study ( N = 12) revealed that the mirror perspective led to faster creation times and more accurate recall compared to the other two perspectives. To further explore user preferences, we conducted a second study ( N = 18) utilizing a VR system with integrated body tracking. By combining distributions of icons from both studies ( N = 30), we confirmed significant preferences in on-body menu placement based on icon category ( e.g. , Social Media icons were consistently placed on forearms). We also discovered associations between categories, such as Leisure and Social Media icons frequently co-occurring. Our findings highlight the importance of the creation process, uncover user preferences for on-body menu organization, and provide insights to guide the development of intuitive and effective on-body interactions within virtual environments.

Moral Certainty instead of Moral Objectivity

This paper argues that although Dworkin’s aim of developing a more practical understanding of moral truth is plausible, his attempt to do that while keeping the concept of moral objectivity remains deeply problematic. Because of its opposition to everything subjective, moral objectivity stands in an inherent conflict with the practical reality that we experience as persons from a first-person perspective; therefore, Dworkin’s attempt to reconceptualize moral objectivity from within a first-person perspective is inherently contradictory. The paper suggests that we should go one step further than Dworkin and give up the concept of moral objectivity altogether. A notion of moral certainty instead of moral objectivity would satisfy Dworkin’s intention of finding a practical conception of moral truth more adequately. A brief preliminary conception of it is developed while invoking the German philosopher Robert Spaemann’s ontology of a person.

Does adapting a self-report instrument to improve its cognitive accessibility for people with intellectual disability result in a better measure? − A cognitive interview study

Background and aimsWe investigated whether improving the cognitive accessibility of a widely used self-report measure leads to better understanding and more accurate answers in a sample of adults with mild intellectual disability and borderline intellectual functioning. Methods and proceduresWe undertook a series of cognitive interviews before and after adaptation of the instructions and selected items of an existing self-report measure of adaptive functioning. Interview results and participant feedback were supplemented with quantitative comparisons between participant and carer scores. Outcomes and resultsAdaptation based on participant experiences and preferences combined with evidence-informed guidelines improved understanding and accuracy. Self-report and carer-report scores showed greater convergence after adaptation; this occurred because people with intellectual disabilities appeared to understand the self-report measure more effectively. Conclusions and implicationsThe results show that adaptation of the self-report instrument to suit the needs and preferences of people with mild intellectual disability or borderline intellectual functioning leads to a more accessible measure and more reliable and valid results. Results also highlight the importance of complementing proxy reports with a first-person perspective in assessment as clients and informants may differ in their assessment of behavior and skills.

Feeling ambiguous about participation in action research

ABSTRACT This descriptive study presents a critical reflexive account of my research journey within a large-scale and long-lasting participatory project aimed at siting, developing and building a repository for low and intermediate-level radioactive waste (LILW) in Belgium. While at the start of my employment I fostered ambitions to address several democratic deficits that our research team had identified in the participatory process and which had been brought to the fore by my predecessors over the years, this optimistic aim soon collided with the reality of top-down-oriented public participation in an institutionalised context. I draw on personal notes to elaborate on my evolution as a researcher with participatory, democratising and transformative aspirations. Several grounding principles of the ‘action research family’ provided me with a reflexive lens to engage in, analyse and comprehend the participatory process within the cAt-project, as well as to grasp the broader context of the project and to reflect on my own research practice. More importantly, in this article, the first-person perspective offers a critical lens through which to reflect on the democratising aspirations of action research and on the challenges researchers face in putting these aspirations into practice.

An Empirical Study on the Effect of Blended Scents in Driving Environments From a Neuro-Cognitive Perspective.

An effective method that is easy to implement and widely applicable for improving driving performance and reducing driving risks remains a challenge. Although fragrances are widely used in daily driving, there is a gap between empirical research on everyday blended fragrances and functional fragrances clinical reports. In this study, a deliberately chosen blend of scent without overtly stimulating or functional proven evidence was tested for its potential to enhance performance in a driving environment. Thirty qualified young drivers were recruited to participate in the experiment. They were asked to watch a 15-min first-person perspective driving video to simulate a driving environment and then complete questionnaires and three sets of behavioral experiments while their brain activity was monitored by EEG. Participants in the scented environment exhibited statistically significant advantages in two cognitive tasks during behavioral measures. These findings were effectively supported by the EEG data, showing that beta waves exhibited more activity in the occipital and prefrontal cortex, enhanced theta waves were observed in the prefrontal cortex, and the TAB index characterizing driving fatigue was suppressed in the prefrontal cortex. This empirical evidence highlights the potential of pleasant, natural, and blended scents in enhancing driving performance, suggesting that promoting the aromatherapy while driving as an easily applicable approach in daily life seems justified and expands the application of aromatherapy in daily life.

Mnemonically modulated perceptual processing to represent allocentric space in macaque inferotemporal cortex

To encode allocentric space information of a viewing object, it is important to relate perceptual information in the first-person perspective to the representation of an entire scene which would be constructed before. A substantial number of studies investigated the constructed scene information (e.g., cognitive map). However, only few studies have focused on its influence on perceptual processing. Therefore, we designed a visually guided saccade task requiring monkeys to gaze at objects in different locations on different backgrounds clipped from large self-designed mosaic pictures (parental pictures). In each trial, we presented moving backgrounds prior to object presentations, indicating a frame position of the background image on a parental picture. We recorded single-unit activities from 377 neurons in the posterior inferotemporal (PIT) cortex of two macaques. Equivalent numbers of neurons showed space-related (119 of 377) and object-related (125 of 377) information. The space-related neurons coded the gaze locations and background images jointly rather than separately. These results suggest that PIT neurons represent a particular location within a particular background image. Interestingly, frame positions of background images on parental pictures modulated the space-related responses dependently on parental pictures. As the frame positions could be acquired by only preceding visual experiences, the present results may provide neuronal evidence of a mnemonic effect on current perception, which might represent allocentric object location in a scene beyond the current view.

Theories of consciousness: A concise overview

Consciousness or conscious experience is a mental phenomenon that is familiar to all of us, but the way in which it is produced escapes us to a large extent. Each person has a vague idea of what it means to be conscious, but consciousness is rather hard to define, albeit easy to identify. It is that function of the brain that makes us conscious of external or internal stimuli and of our thoughts regarding these subjective experiences. Conscious experience is a first-person perspective of mental states and events tracking as they unfold. It includes mental phenomena such as a perception, emotion, memory, idea, continuous temporal sequence of events. A mental process and its adjoining neurophysiological phenomena represent two aspects of the same event. We have direct access to the mental aspect, while we can observe the neurophysiological aspect only when we study the event as a biological process. The psychological study of consciousness describes the special properties of this brain function, its origin and utility in the global economy of an animal organism. The neurobiological study aims to find the neural correlates of consciousness, aims to establish causal relations between the neural phenomena and the different conscious states. Lastly, the formulation of an explanatory theory can provide a satisfactory understanding of the phenomenon. This review aims to bring some clarification in the field of consciousness, selecting the hypotheses which mostly fulfill the requirements, in order to be confirmed as explanatory theories. A valuable test for confirming an explanatory hypothesis is its predictive power. Using this criterion we have evaluated comparatively, some of the proposed explaining hypotheses.

Effects of expressive writing and self-distancing on electrodermal activity during writing

Writing about traumas can influence mood and bodily changes. In three studies we researched the influence of writing on affective and physiological changes by measuring electrodermal activity (EDA) during expressive writing sessions and manipulating self-distancing. In Study 1, we randomly assigned 57 participants to write about control or expressive topics using a first-person perspective (I). In Study 2, we assigned 55 participants to write about control or expressive topics using a third-person perspective (She/He). And in Study 3, we compared the effects of perspective (first or third-person) in the data collected in the preceding studies. Across Study 1 and 2 results showed that EDA consistently rose at the beginning of the writing session, reached a plateau, and then rose again upon completing the writing task, irrespective of the writing topic or perspective. While the initial EDA increase seems related to the start of a demanding task, the post-writing increase might signal reward-seeking behavior upon task completion. Results of Study 3 confirmed that EDA increases in the beginning and upon writing completion are magnified by adopting a third-person perspective. These results show that expressive writing and self-distancing have measurable impacts on writers’ electrodermal activity.