A Connectionist Explanation of Presence in Virtual Environments

Presence can be understood as the sensation that a virtual environment is a real place, that the user is actually in the virtual environment rather than at the display terminal, or that the medium used to display the environment has disappeared leaving the environment itself. We present an attempt to unite various presence approaches by reducing each to a common basis (behavior selection and control) and re-conceptualizing presence in these terms by defining cognitive presence – the mental state where the VE rather than the real environment is acting as the basis for behavior selection. The thesis presents the construction of a three-layer connectionist model to explain and predict cognitive presence. This model takes input from two major sources: the perceptual modalities of the user, and the mental state of the user. These two basic sources of input competitively spread activation to a central layer which competitively determines which behavior script will be applied to regulate behavior.