| Title | Interoceptive Awareness: The "being" Dimension of "being There” in Games and Virtual Worlds |
| Presenter(s) | Tom Day, Carrie Heeter and Leticia Cherchiglia |
| Session | Embodiment and Games |
| Time | Thursday, October 11, 11:00a-12:00p |
| Location | MSU Room |
| Format | Paper Presentation |
| Description | In this paper we introduce, operationalize, and test a theoretical conceptualization of interoceptive awareness (IA) in games and virtual worlds that parallels neurobiological explanations of interoception and embodied presence. We developed a scale to measure state IA during a Virtual Reality (VR) experience by adapting the Multidimensional Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) scale that was originally created to measure the effects of meditation programs on general propensity for interoceptive awareness in daily life (trait IA). Results suggest that: 1) state IA was correlated with and significantly higher than trait IA; 2) state IA during the meditation was not different between eyes closed and VR conditions, also VR display technology did not influence state IA; and 3) higher state IA was associated with significantly stronger feelings of spatial presence, whereas display technology had no relationship to spatial presence. |
