Abstract
A major thrust in building intelligent systems is to encourage users to capitalize their existing real world non-digital skills and seamlessly integrate the representations users have built in real world activities with their ongoing interactions with computing systems. In virtual environments, studies have demonstrated that users treat virtual environments as if they were real even when the environments were a crude approximation to real environments. These results revealed that the feeling of presence is a fluid dynamic psychological state that could vary depending on individual users’ characteristics. The current study aimed to investigate whether individual differences in working memory capacity impact the feelings of presence in virtual environments. Participants performed a vegetable cutting task on behalf of an avatar in a desktop virtual environment. Experiment 1 revealed that high working memory (HWM) individuals cut closer to the fingertip of the avatar than low working memory (LWM) individuals. Experiment 2 used eye-tracking measures and revealed that HWM participants mitigated the demonstrated risk by planning. Taken together, Experiments 1 and 2 provide evidence how individual differences in working memory capacity can impact the feelings of presence in virtual environments and demonstrated that our conscious experiences of what is real is malleable.
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Rawlinson, T.G., Lu, S., Coleman, P. (2012). Individual Differences in Working Memory Capacity and Presence in Virtual Environments. In: Zhang, H., Hussain, A., Liu, D., Wang, Z. (eds) Advances in Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems. BICS 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7366. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31561-9_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31561-9_3
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