Feeling Present in the Physical World and in Computer-Mediated Environments

J. Waterworth, G. Riva

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137431677
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Persönlichkeit in der Psychologie

This concise volume presents for the first time a coherent and detailed account of why we experience feelings of being present in the physical world and in computer-mediated environments, why we often don't, and why it matters - for design, psychotherapy, tool use and social creativity amongst other practical applications.

1

The Importance of Feeling Present

Abstract: Chapter 1 opens the book with a brief discussion of the meaning of presence and why it is important. The sense of presence is characterized as a basic state of consciousness – the conscious feeling of being located in an external world, at the present time. This applies to the physical world in which our bodies are located, to virtual worlds created through technological mediation, and to blended mixture of the two – the physical and the virtual. Attention is drawn to the fact that, since technology is quickly changing and proliferating in our lives, presence is itself evolving into new forms, some of which are discussed later. The chapter closes with an outline of the overall scope and content of the book.

Waterworth, John and Giuseppe Riva. Feeling Present in the Physical World and in Computer-Mediated Environments. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137431677.0003.

The meaning of presence

This book presents an evolutionary account of the sense of presence in physical and computer-mediated environments. We characterize the sense of presence as a basic state of consciousness – the conscious feeling of being in an external world, at the present time. This applies to the physical world in which our bodies are located, to virtual worlds created through technological mediation, and to blended mixture of the two – the physical and the virtual. We provide a model for understanding why we sometimes feel present in these places, why we sometimes do not, and why it matters. We start the story with a question.

Do you really feel present in the place your body is located right now? In other words, do you feel a sense of your own presence in your current physical surroundings? Almost certainly yes, since you were just asked the question. And at least to some extent just before that, unless you were asleep; but then again, maybe not all that much. The extent to which you feel present in the world depends on where your attention is focused and why. Is your awareness really occupied by what is happening around you, so that you are mentally present? Or are you more absorbed in your own thoughts, plans, memories – or even this book – in which case you are more or less mentally absent from your current location? In our daily life we constantly move between mental presence and absence in response to the practicalities of our situation, balancing the need to attend to the immediate environment with the need to think about what we are doing, have done, or are going to do.

Let’s take an extreme example. Imagine you are sitting in a lecture hall listening to a speaker, but the speech is terribly boring. You try to listen to it, to be mentally present in the room, but your attention just wanders away and towards thinking about the fun that you had on a night out the previous evening. For a while, the lecture hall is little or no part of your experience, and you have become what we label as absent. Then the hardness of the seating and the coldness of the lecture hall draw your attention back to the room you are physically in, and you become somewhat present. You try again to take in what the speaker is saying, but this time you drift off into thinking about what to have for dinner and the shopping you are going to have to do on the way home. And so it goes on until, suddenly, a crazed-looking person crashes into the room near the speaker, and moves towards the audience wielding a large axe, which appears to be dripping blood. In an instant, and for the first time that afternoon, you are totally present in the room.

The story above illustrates that how present you feel varies widely according to events, to your activities, interests, moods, and energy levels, amongst many other things. It varies from day to day, and even moment by moment, as in the situation just described. This is entirely normal and necessary. To function effectively requires appropriate levels of presence and absence over time, as events unfold according to changing external and personal circumstances. An imbalance in the relative levels of presence and absence is reflected in ineffective, non-adaptive, and sometimes physically hazardous behaviour. To function effectively, our focus of attention must shift appropriately between the outside world and the private world of thoughts, plans and memories, and we must be able to feel the difference. The ability to feel this is the sense of presence.

Our experiences in daily life are increasingly mediated by information technology and communication technologies, and our experience of presence is often a result of this. The task of maintaining a balance between presence and absence has changed dramatically with the widespread adoption of electronic devices such as mobile phones, tablet computers, wearable devices and large screen displays. For example, we are surrounded by people walking while texting in the street or phoning while driving their cars, and we all are doing the same. Digital devices provide us with information and experiences wherever we are, so that the task of balancing presence and absence has changed – and it will continue to change. Any consideration of the nature and future of human experience needs to take account of the importance of this mediated presence. Mediated presence is the feeling of being in an external world, in the realization of which information and communication technologies play a role. The immediate world in which we all live is a mediated world.

Interest in the sense of presence was initially stimulated by the widely reported sensation experienced during the use of interactive virtual reality (VR) environments, of “being there” – of (to some degree) feeling that one is actually physically present within the portrayed but virtual reality. Initially this mediated presence was called telepresence, because it was primarily seen as a technology-induced illusion of being present in one (simulated) place when one is actually present in another (physical) place. Mediated presence is most obviously a key element in our experience of media such as interactive games and therapeutic virtual realities. When we experience strong mediated presence, our experience is that the technology has become part of the self, and the mediated reality part of the world in which we exist.

When we feel strong mediated presence, we react emotionally and bodily (at least to some extent) as if the virtual world existed physically. But while interest in mediated presence was aroused by the development of virtual reality technology in the 1990s, it has now expanded to other forms of interactive experiences and situations, and indeed to the experience of digital media in general. As Biocca (1997) pointed out, “while the design of virtual reality technology has brought the theoretical issue of presence to the fore, few theorists argue that the experience of presence suddenly emerged with the arrival of virtual reality.”

We suggest that the sense of presence is the result of an evolved neuropsychological process, created through the evolution of the central nervous system, to solve a key problem for survival: How to differentiate between the internal (the self) and the external (the other)? The strength of the feeling of presence reflects the extent to which conscious attention is focused on the non-self, the other, and variations in the strength of this feeling provide vital information for survival. This fundamental animal ability has developed in humans into the ability to distinguish external, physical events and situations from events and situations realized mentally, in thought and imagination. This is a necessary distinction that cannot be made on the basis of emotional appraisal or reality judgements, because imagined situations trigger the same emotional responses as physical situations (Russell, 1996) and may also be judged real or unreal (as may physical events).

From a survival standpoint, it is obviously vital for all sentient creatures to respond rapidly to present threats and opportunities in the environment, through the appropriate allocation of attention. Our perspective is that the sense of presence as a mental faculty was designed by evolution to ensure that organisms know when they are attending to the external world – to things in their here and now that might affect their survival. This is the case even though, and because, they use much of the same mental machinery to generate internal worlds and their experiences of them. To be able to do this, they need to feel directly when they are attending to the current external world – and this is the feeling of presence. Mistaking thoughts for actions or vice versa is a serious, and potentially fatal, error or mental processing. The feeling of presence is in our view analogous to feeling emotion; it is informative, direct, and has a long evolutionary history. It is closely bound up with the intention to act, of mental and bodily readiness for action in the world.

The evolution of mediated presence

As more and more of our experiences are mediated by digital information and communication technology, it is reasonable to see the future of the human sense of presence as reflecting the rapid development of ever more pervasive digital technologies, which will increasingly mediate our experiences in the future. As we increasingly come to rely on mediated experiences, the circumstances for our feelings of presence will change. The ways in which our sense of presence develops in the future will thus reflect the evolution of consciousness through technological mediation.

Currently, we can see two main trends in the evolution of presence: VR and blended reality. Interest in the topic of presence was initially stimulated by the development of immersive and convincing virtual realities in the 1980s and 1990s, and spread more generally to immersive media such as surround sound and vision systems and stereoscopic movies. VR applications were successfully developed for various purposes, including artistic, educational and – of special interest to the themes in this book – psychotherapeutic. With falling technology prices more people installed richly sensory cinema systems at home, and many 3D movies have been released for these and for high-tech cinema viewing. Despite this, truly immersive VR responsive to head and body movements and with low-latency stereoscopic displays did not reach a mass market, largely because of the costs and complexities involved. This seems to be changing with the emergence of relatively low-cost but highly effective movement-sensitive head-mounted displays, in particular the Oculus Rift™ recently developed by Oculus VR^®.

The other trend in presence is towards capitalizing on our hereditary capacity for presence in the physical world by embedding the virtual within it, in so-called blended reality. The emergence of ambient displays, tangible interaction objects, environmentally embedded sensors and a variety of location and state-sensitive mobile devices have made it possible for the physical and the virtual to be combined as never before, in a way that allows our natural sense of presence in the physical world to be preserved (potentially, at least) while we also deal with virtual entities, distant people, and other digitized sources of information.

The smart location-aware mobile phone, with multiple functions including internet, television and other media access, is the most obvious example of information technology penetrating ever more pervasively into our everyday lives and affecting our feelings of presence. And there are many others, including those in the home, the car, and the office. When using most existing products of this type there is competition for the user’s conscious attention between the physical and the digital worlds, still representing a potentially dangerous conflict. This is why, for example, using a mobile phone while driving is illegal in many countries. This is not only a conflict between presence here and presence there, but often also a conflict between self and other, presence and absence – since the right balance of the two is necessary for effective action in the world.

The future effect on consciousness of the rapid evolution of ever more pervasive digital technologies is often interpreted in terms of three inter-related arguments. The first is that the technology in general is increasingly part of our selves: not only embedded devices such as pacemakers or electrodes on the brain, but also carried devices such as mobile phones and even laptops are all parts of us – and we are (and always have been) cyborgs (e.g. Clark, 2003). The second is that “embodied” interaction characterizes our future with information technology (Dourish, 2001) through tangible interaction. In tangible interaction, physical objects are used to represent virtual entities and are manipulated bodily (usually manually) to interact with information systems, creating a kind of mixed reality space. For example, images may be projected by a computer system onto the surfaces of physical objects or manikins, while movements of these or other objects may also be tracked and interpreted as significant actions by the human user. The third argument is that the individual is in some ways an abstraction; the mind is already extended by information technology beyond the body, through extended perception and “distributed cognition” (e.g. Hutchins, 1996).

These views are very general – so general that they are not very useful scientifically, since they do not provide the specificity to answer the question: When does technology not become part of us? However, we can shed light on the answer through a consideration of the sense of mediated presence, and how this reflects a continuing need to distinguish self from other. Only some kinds of digital technology become part of the self. From the vantage point of an understanding of presence, we can predict which kinds of technology will become part of the self, and which will remain part of the other, the non-self – devices that we have and use, but which do not become part of us. To the extent that we feel present via a technology, that technology has become part of our embodiment.

The scope of this book

In Chapter 2, we describe how the strength of the human feeling of presence is determined by two main factors: the extent to which conscious attention is tightly focused or more diffuse, and the degree of integration of different layers of presence derived from three levels of the functioning of the self: proto (proprioceptive) presence, core (perceptual) presence, and extended (reflective) presence. Maximum presence occurs when attention is tightly focused, and the three layers are integrated. Minimum presence, which we term absence, occurs when attention is tightly focused but the three layers are not integrated. Failures or maladjustments of the presence ability have predictable consequences in various forms of psychological distress that can be understood in terms of our model. It is from the experienced distinction between presence and absence that the therapeutic potential of new information technology derives.

In Chapter 3 we show how this evolutionary model of presence provides the missing link between two different but converging perspectives for understanding human action provided by recent research in neuroscience: the cognitive and the volitional. On one side, cognitive studies analyse how action is planned and controlled in response to environmental conditions. On the other side, volitional studies analyse how action is planned and controlled by subject’s needs, motives and goals. In this chapter we suggest that the notion of presence can serve as the missing link between these two approaches. In particular, a consideration of presence can explain how we can distinguish between a perceived action, a planned and an executed one. We go on to argue that the evolutionary role of presence is the control of agency through the unconscious separation of “internal” and “external” and the enaction/reenaction of intentions. We conclude that our interpretation of the role of presence in action is beginning to be supported by evidence of the neural and other physical correlates of motor acts, imitation and self-monitoring. Another strength is that it provides testable predictions about how to improve the experience of presence in media: maximal presence in a mediated experience arises from an optimal combination of form and content, able to support the intentions of the user.

Chapter 4 goes more deeply into exactly what happens with presence when action is implemented using a tool. First, we propose a taxonomy of mediated action distinguishing between “first-order mediated action”, “second-order mediated action” and “second-order avatar-based mediated action”. We then argue that these mediated actions through tools, when produced intuitively, have different and predictable effects on our experience of body and space (bodily self-consciousness).

Chapter 5 presents a framework for understanding the potentials for the design of individual presence through interaction. Taking the insights related to presence through tool use presented in Chapter 4, together with the idea that the sense of presence characterizes the experience of embodiment in the world (and in mediated worlds), we distinguish three general forms of mediated presence resulting from expanded, altered and distributed embodiment. Presence in expanded embodiment is typified by immersive VR: our sense of self expands outside the body and we feel ourselves to be in a place that is not the one in which our body is physically located. The design possibilities of VR are almost limitless. In altered embodiment, we experience presence in our physica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Importance of Feeling Present
• 2  The Layers of Presence
• 3  Presence as the Link between Intention and Action
• 4  Presence, Digital Tools and the Body
• 5  The Designed Presence of the Individual
• 6  Presence in Social Environments
• 7  Conclusions
• References
• Index