The Relationship between Immersion and Psychophysiological Indicators

Psychophysiological indicators have garnered significant interest in the assessment of presence. However, despite this interest, the nature of the relationship between psychophysiological indicators and presence factors remains undetermined. Presence, the perceived realness of a mediated or virtual experience, is modulated by two factors: immersion and coherence. Immersion represents the extent and precision of the simulated sensory modalities, while coherence refers to the environment's ability to behave as expected by the user. To study the relationship between psychophysiological indicators and presence factors, we objectively manipulated immersion by altering three visual qualities. The visual qualities were set to values above, at, or below their functional threshold. These thresholds are defined as a perceptual boundary under which a sensory quality value should be considered functionally degraded. Sixty participants performed a driving task in a virtual environment under the aforementioned conditions, while we measured their cardiovascular and eye responses. We found that degraded immersion conditions yielded significantly different psychophysiological indicator results than the condition without degradation. However, we observed an effect of immersion degradation on our measured variables only when the visual conditions were set below the functional threshold. Manipulations of immersion below the functional threshold introduced unreasonable circumstances which modified our participants' behavior. Thus, our findings suggest a direct impact of immersion on coherence and highlight the sensitivity of psychophysiological indicators to the coherence of a virtual environment. These results have theoretical implications, as a presence concepts relationship model should include the direct impact of immersion on coherence.