Feeling present in arousing virtual reality worlds: prefrontal brain regions differentially orchestrate presence experience in adults and children

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) is a powerful tool for simulating aspects of the real world. The success of VR is thought to depend on its ability to evoke a sense of "being there", that is, the feeling of "Presence". In view of the rapid progress in the development of increasingly more sophisticated virtual environments (VE), the importance of understanding the neural underpinnings of presence is growing. To date however, the neural correlates of this phenomenon have received very scant attention. An fMRI-based study with 52 adults and 25 children was therefore conducted using a highly immersive VE. The experience of presence in adult subjects was found to be modulated by two major strategies involving two homologous prefrontal brain structures. Whereas the right DLPFC controlled the sense of presence by down-regulating the activation in the egocentric dorsal visual processing stream, the left DLPFC up-regulated widespread areas of the medial prefrontal cortex known to be involved in self-refl ective and stimulus-independent thoughts. In contrast, there was no evidence of these two strategies in children. In fact, anatomical analyses showed that these two prefrontal areas have not yet reached full maturity in children. Taken together, this study presents the fi rst fi ndings that show activation of a highly specifi c neural network orchestrating the experience of presence in adult subjects, and that the absence of activity in this neural network might contribute to the generally increased susceptibility of children for the experience of presence in VEs.

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“…In very general terms, the success of a given virtual reality is thought to be associated with the subjective sense of "being there". This feeling is widely referred to as presence [39]. The meaning of the term "presence" has been generalized to the illusion of being at a distant place [40,41].…”

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“…fMRI Combining presence with Virtual Reality and fMRI, there is the study of Baumgartner et al (2008), who compared brain activation between children and adults while watching a video of a roller coaster, to identify the areas related to the sense of presence and the differences with the age due to the maturity of the brain. Despite being only videos, they distinguished between the environments of high (Figure 3.2 left) and low ( Figure 3.2 right) arousal, so the sense of presence was equally stimulated.…”

“…The main hypothesis of this research was that brain activation would be higher during a navigation task than during a video or photograph task in areas such as the cuneus and the parietal lobe, which are known to be related to presence from previous studies. Taking into account the results of Baumgartner et al (2008), it was also expected to find negative correlations between the activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and self-reported presence scores.…”

“…In accordance with the results obtained in previous similar studies (Pine et al, 2002;Baumgartner et al, 2008), the data were tested for task related activation by performing a one-sample t-test including contrast images of estimated parameters from all the subjects for the differences of interest between conditions. In total, three one-sample t-test were performed, for the contrasts "navigation>video", "navigation>photographs" and "video>photographs".…”

“…"navigation>video", "navigation>photographs" and "video>photographs") were performed, where the differences between the SUS mean results for the experimental conditions compared in the contrast (see Baumgartner et al, 2008) were used as covariate. The covariate then was a vector of 14 components, one for each subject.…”