DESCRIPTION
Media technologies have always provided limited access to other places and other people. New designs in network technologies promise to offer a better sense of access to other places - the sense of presence - and more satisfying and productive access to other people - the sense of social presence. The problems of how to define, measure, and improve physical presence and social presence have become both challenging and practical problems in communication theory, virtual environment design, and in psychological measurement.
In an effort to assess how users responded to the presence of mediated others and artificial agents, we developed the Networked Minds Measure of Social Presence. The self-report measure attempts to assess the user's sense of co-presence of mediated other and different cognitive and emotional dimensions of how users perceive, feel present with, and model the "minds of mediated others and agents.
The problem of social presence is a subset of a larger, long-standing fundamental philosophical problem of access to other minds. The various studies in this project explore how technology affects the way we model the minds of other intelligent beings we experience in virtual environments.
RESEARCH GOALS
Develop a theory and measure of social presence in mediated environments.
Create reliable, valid, and useful measures of social presence.
Explore the differences, if any, between human responses to agents and avatars.
Explore users mental models of the "minds of agents.
