Being Somewhere

To understand the experience of being present somewhere else, via a digital environment, we start by considering how we can experience being anywhere. We present several different philosophical and psychological perspectives on this, stressing the importance of perception. Each has something to offer and add to our understanding of digital travel. We compare four philosophical views: representationalism, relationism, enactivism and the sense-data view. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, but relationism is best placed to accommodate perceptual illusions, which is a prevalent view of the psychological nature of telepresence experiences. As suggested by enactivism and the direct perception approach, the possibilities for action in the world are important to the nature of our experience of places. This, in turn, is influenced by the characteristics of the world in which we act, through affordances.

Predictive Processing and Some Disillusions about Illusions

A number of perceptual (exteroceptive and proprioceptive) illusions present problems for predictive processing accounts. In this chapter we’ll review explanations of the Müller-Lyer Illusion (MLI), the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) and the Alien Hand Illusion (AHI) based on the idea of Prediction Error Minimization (PEM), and show why they fail. In spite of the relatively open communicative processes which, on many accounts, are posited between hierarchical levels of the cognitive system in order to facilitate the minimization of prediction errors, perceptual illusions seemingly allow prediction errors to rule. Even if, at the top, we have reliable and secure knowledge that the lines in the MLI are equal, or that the rubber hand in the RHI is not our hand, the system seems unable to correct for sensory errors that form the illusion. We argue that the standard PEM explanation based on a short-circuiting principle doesn’t work. This is the idea that where there are general statistical regularities in the environment there is a kind of short circuiting such that relevant priors are relegated to lower-level processing so that information from higher levels is not exchanged (Ogilvie and Carruthers, Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7:721–742, 2016), or is not as precise as it should be (Hohwy, The Predictive Mind, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). Such solutions (without convincing explanation) violate the idea of open communication and/or they over-discount the reliable and secure knowledge that is in the system. We propose an alternative, 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) solution. We argue that PEM fails to take into account the ‘structural resistance’ introduced by material and cultural factors in the broader cognitive system.

Driving and Flying Simulators: A Review on Relevant Considerations and Trends

Flying and driving simulation has encouraged an enormous and growing community in a wide variety of areas such as research centers, driver or pilot training academies, vehicle-testing facilities, amusement parks, and even at home by household enthusiasts, providing carefully integrated visual and perceptual illusions of driving or flying real vehicles. The global research on this subject is explored during the period 2000 to 2019 from an interdisciplinary perspective based on a systematic methodology, providing both new and experienced researchers with broad guidance toward key aspects for further investigations and developments. Emphasis is given to the analysis of the findings and in particular to their applicability, to an extent not attempted earlier, by considering both human and machine aspects.

The Interaction between Motion and Texture in the Sense of Touch

Besides providing information on elementary properties of objects-like texture, roughness, and softness-the sense of touch is also important in building a representation of object movement, and the movement of our hands. Neural and behavioral studies shed light on the mechanisms and limits of our sense of touch in the perception of texture and motion, and of its role in the control of movement of our hands. The interplay between the geometrical and mechanical properties of the touched objects, such as shape and texture, the movement of the hand exploring the object, and the motion felt by touch, will be discussed in this article. Interestingly, the interaction between motion and textures can generate perceptual illusions in touch. For example, the orientation and the spacing of the texture elements on a static surface induces the illusion of surface motion when we move our hand on it or can elicit the perception of a curved trajectory during sliding, straight hand movements. In this work we present a multiperspective view that encompasses both the perceptual and the motor aspects, as well as the response of peripheral and central nerve structures, to analyze and better understand the complex mechanisms underpinning the tactile representation of texture and motion. Such a better understanding of the spatiotemporal features of the tactile stimulus can reveal novel transdisciplinary applications in neuroscience and haptics.

Remotely Perceived: Investigating the Influence of Valence on Self-Perception and Social Experience for Dyadic Video-Conferencing With Personalized Avatars

Avatar use on video-conference platforms has found dual purpose in recent times as a potential method for ensuring privacy and improving subjective engagement with remote meeting, provided one can also ensure a minimal loss in the quality of social interaction and sense of personal presence. This work focuses on interactions of this sort through real-time motion captured 3D personalized virtual avatars in a 2D video-conferencing context. Our experiments were designed with the intention of exploring previously defined perceptual illusions that occur with avatar-use in Virtual and Augmented Reality settings, outside of the immersive technological domains where they are normally measured. The research described here was aimed at empirically evaluating three separate dimensions of human-avatar interaction. The first was humans-as-avatars, with experimental conditions that were designed to measure changes to subjective perceptions of self-face ownership and self-concept. The second focus was other-perception, with the unique design of the studies outlined below among the first to measure social presence in a video-call between two human-driven avatars. The third emphasis was on the experiential content involved in avatar use, as there were measurements for emotion induction, fatigue and behavior change included in the data collection. The results describe some evidence for face and body ownership, while participants also reported high levels of social presence with the other avatar, indicating that avatar cameras could be a favorable alternative to non-camera feeds in video conferencing. There were also some useful insights gained regarding emotion elicitation in non-video vs. avatar conditions, as well as avatar-induced behavior change.

High-Level Perception and Multimodal Perception

What is the correct procedure for determining the contents of perception? Philosophers tackling this question increasingly rely on empirically oriented procedures. This chapter argues that this strategy constitutes an improvement over the armchair methodology of phenomenal contrast arguments, but that there is a respect in which current empirical procedures remain limited: they are unimodal in nature, wrongly treating the senses as isolatable. The chapter thus has two aims: first, to motivate a reorientation of the admissible contents debate into a multimodal framework. The second is to explore whether experimental studies of multimodal perception support a so-called Liberal account of perception’s admissible contents. The chapter concludes that the McGurk effect and the ventriloquist effect are both explicable without the postulation of high-level content, but that at least one multimodal experimental paradigm may necessitate such content: the rubber hand illusion. One upshot is that Conservatives who claim that the Liberal view intolerably broadens the scope of perceptual illusions, particularly from the perspective of perceptual psychology, should pursue other arguments against that view.

A Novel Integrated Information Processing Model of Presence

The objective of this paper is to conduct a narrative literature review on multisensory integration and propose a novel information processing model of presence in virtual reality (VR). The first half of the paper introduces basic multisensory integration (implicit information processing) and the integration of coherent stimuli (explicit information processing) in the physical environment, offering an explanation for people's reactions during VR immersions and is an important component of our model. To help clarify these concepts, examples are provided. The second half of the paper addresses multisensory integration in VR. Three models in the literature examine the role that multisensory integration plays in inducing various perceptual illusions and the relationship between embodiment and presence in VR. However, they do not relate specifically to presence and multisensory integration. We propose a novel model of presence using elements of these models and suggest that implicit and explicit information processing lead to presence. We refer to presence as a perceptual illusion that includes a plausibility illusion (the feeling that the scenario in the virtual environment is actually occurring) and a place illusion (the feeling of being in the place depicted in the virtual environment), based on efficient and congruent multisensory integration.

Motoric and Perceptual Kinesthetic Symmetry in Bi-manual Interactions

Bi-manual (two-handed) actions have shown notable success in rehabilitative and therapeutic applications from the point of motor symmetry. Recent studies have shown that symmetry in actions is attributed to sensorimotor perception than mere co-activation of homologous muscles. In this paper, we present a study of symmetric and asymmetric haptic (specifically force) feedback on human perception and motor action during bi-manual spatial tasks. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first procedure to specifically test the perceptual aspect of bi-manual actions in contrast to other works that typically characterize the physical/bio-mechanical aspects. Thereby in our experiment, healthy individuals were tasked with stretching a virtual spring using two symmetrically located haptics devices that provide an equal amount of resistive force on each hand while pulling the spring. In this experiment, we implement four kinesthetic conditions, namely (1) feedback on both hands, (2) feedback only on dominant hand, (3) feedback only on non-dominant hand, and (4) no feedback as our control. Our first goal was to determine if there exists a range of spring stiffness in which the individual incorrectly perceives bi-manual forces when the feedback is deactivated on one hand. Subsequently, we also wanted to investigate what range of spring stiffness would lead to such perceptual illusions. Our analysis shows that not only does such a range exist, it is wide enough so as to be potentially utilized in future rehabilitative applications.

Dissociating the Influence of Perceptual Biases and Contextual Artifacts Within Target Configurations During the Planning and Control of Visually Guided Action

The failure of perceptual illusions to elicit corresponding biases within movement supports the view of two visual pathways separately contributing to perception and action. However, several alternative findings may contest this overarching framework. The present study aimed to examine the influence of perceptual illusions within the planning and control of aiming. To achieve this, we manipulated and measured the planning/control phases by respectively perturbing the target illusion (relative size-contrast illusion; Ebbinghaus/Titchener circles) following movement onset and detecting the spatiotemporal characteristics of the movement trajectory. The perceptual bias that was indicated by the perceived target size estimates failed to correspondingly manifest within the effective target size. While movement time (specifically, time after peak velocity) was affected by the target configuration, this outcome was not consistent with the direction of the perceptual illusions. These findings advocate an influence of the surrounding contextual information (e.g., annuli) on movement control that is independent of the direction predicted by the illusion.