Identifying Discrepancies Between Measurements of Visual, Felt Presence and Tactile, Judged Presence

Unlike other screen-based technologies such as computer monitors, virtual reality (VR)systems allow the user to feel a sense of presence – the sense that they are actuallysituated within the surrounding virtual environment. Although the foundational experience ofexisting within a physical environment goes far beyond aspects of vision, our study is thefirst, to our knowledge, to operationalise and measure different facets of themultidimensional concept of the SOOP, ranging from indirect, trial-by-trial measures ofreaction times and accuracy to higher-order aspects of presence judgements such as theirtrial-by-trial metacognitive efficiency, and to modality-specific and modality-general global(i.e. across many trials), retrospective self-report measures. We primarily hypothesised thatwhilst multisensory stimulation is the most important factor in the creation of presence,unisensory touch will be a greater causative factor in the creation of presence thanunisensory vision. 44 participants completed an implicit reaction-time task (reacting to targetstimuli) and an explicit metacognitive task (rating confidence in object presence). Wemanipulated sense type (unisensory vs multisensory), sensory modality (vision vs touch) andtemporal order (e.g., touch-first vs. vision-first). Results indicated that multisensoryintegration significantly enhanced metacognitive efficacy, accuracy and reaction speedscompared to unisensory conditions. However, a key dissociation emerged betweenunisensory modalities. While participants reacted faster to visual stimuli, they achievedhigher perceptual accuracy with tactile stimuli, with participants retrospectively rating touchas feeling significantly more "real" than vision. These findings support the notion that realtime "felt" presence and retrospective "judged" presence may be caused by distinct factors.