Avatars and computer-mediated communication: a review of the definitions, uses, and effects of digital representations

Avatars are growing in popularity and present in many interfaces used for computer-mediated communication (CMC) including social media, e-commerce, and education. Communication researchers have been investigating avatars for over twenty years, and an examination of this literature reveals similarities but also notable discrepancies in conceptual definitions. The goal of this review is to provide a general overview of current debates, methodological approaches, and trends in findings. Our review synthesizes previous research in four areas. First, we examine how scholars have conceptualized the term “avatar,” identify similarities and differences across these definitions, and recommend that scholars use the term consistently. Next, we review theoretical perspectives relevant to avatar perception (e.g., the computers as social actors framework). Then, we examine avatar characteristics that communicators use to discern the humanity and social potential of an avatar (anthropomorphism, form realism, behavioral realism, and perceived agency) and discuss implications for attributions and communication outcomes. We also review findings on the social categorization of avatars, such as when people apply categories like sex, gender, race, and ethnicity to their evaluations of digital representations. Finally, we examine research on avatar selection and design relevant to communication outcomes. Here, we review both motivations in CMC contexts (such as self-presentation and identity expression) and potential effects (e.g., persuasion). We conclude with a discussion of future directions for avatar research and propose that communication researchers consider avatars not just as a topic of study, but also as a tool for testing theories and understanding critical elements of human communication. Avatar mediated environments provide researchers with a number of advantageous technological affordances that can enable manipulations that may be difficult or inadvisable to execute in natural environments. We conclude by discussing the use of avatar research to extend communication theory and our understanding of communication processes

Right here, right now: situated interventions to change consumer habits

Consumer behavior-change interventions have traditionally encouraged consumers to form conscious intentions, but in the past decade it has been shown that while these interventions have a medium-to-large effect in changing intentions, they have a much smaller effect in changing behavior. Consumers often do not act in accordance with their conscious intentions because situational cues in the immediate environment automatically elicit learned, habitual behaviors. It has therefore been suggested that researchers refocus their efforts on developing interventions that target unconscious, unintentional influences on behavior, such as cue-behavior (“habit”) associations. To develop effective consumer behavior-change interventions, however, we argue that it is first important to understand how consumer experiences are represented in memory, in order to successfully target the situational cues that most strongly predict engagement in habitual behavior. In this article, we present a situated cognition perspective of habits and discuss how the situated cognition perspective extends our understanding of how consumer experiences are represented in memory, and the processes through which these situational representations can be retrieved in order to elicit habitual consumer behaviors. Based on the principles of situated cognition, we then discuss five ways that interventions could change consumer habits by targeting situational cues in the consumer environment and suggest how existing interventions utilizing these behavior-change strategies could be improved by integrating the principles of the situated cognition approach

Presence predicts false memories of virtual environment content

False memories can be created by a simple priming manipulation (the Deese-Roediger-McDermott procedure). This phenomenon operates via the strong associative character of declarative memory. If it is true that that content knowledge plays an important role in presence (As some have argued), then a presence experience could prime a subject and create false memories. We tested this notion by repeatedly exposing 47 subjects to a themed VE, and after a 72 hour delay, testing their recall of VE content. As predicted, subjects tended to have higher false memory rates (of VE content) than chance levels for moderately specific false memory items, and lower than chance level rates of false memory for highly specific items. Furthermore, engagement and naturalness (as measured with the ITC-SOPI) predicted false memory rates. These findings support the notion that subjects’ semantic knowledge plays a role in the presence experience

The Role of Content Preference on Thematic Priming in Virtual Presence

We set out to test the possibility that thematically priming participants with exposure to a familiar, contemporary introduction VE (with a hip-hop theme) could increase their levels of presence in a culturally unfamiliar, historical VE (a San storytelling VE). Our findings show that the relationship between priming and presence are more complex than previously thought. Specifically, for those participants who were primed with the hip-hop introductory VE, only those who chose hip-hop music as their favorite music genre derived any benefit from the introductory VE in terms of presence scores (measured on the Igroup questionnaire). This implies that thematic priming interacts with personal preference and that introductory VEs of this sort do not necessary improve the presence experience for all users

Spotless? Perceived Cleanliness in Service Environments

This dissertation presents research on customers’ perceptions of cleanliness in service environments. The research contributes to the gap in the literature on cleanliness examined from a customer perspective, and adds to the understanding of environmental cues that influence perceived cleanliness. Part one of the dissertation includes the operationalisation of the concept of perceived cleanliness and the development of an instrument to measure perceived cleanliness. Results showed that perceived cleanliness consists of three dimensions: cleaned, fresh, and uncluttered. Next, the Cleanliness Perceptions Scale (CP-scale) was developed and validated in different service environments, resulting in a 12 item questionnaire that can be used to measure perceived cleanliness in service environments. Part two includes the experimental research on the effects of different environmental cues on perceived cleanliness. It furthermore explores to what extent the effects of these environmental cues on perceived cleanliness can be explained by the concept of priming. The experiments demonstrated that particular environmental cues influence perceived cleanliness: the visible presence of cleaning staff, light colour, light scent, and uncluttered architecture positively influence customers’ perceptions of cleanliness in service environments. Also, empirical support was found for priming as one of the mechanisms involved in the effects. Part three reflects on the implications of the dissertation for theory and practice. The research provides knowledge that is relevant for the fields of facility management, service marketing, social psychology, and environmental psychology. The dissertation improves the understanding of the concept of perceived cleanliness by enabling scholars and practitioners to measure the concept and the effects of particular environmental cues in service environments

Content knowledge and thematic inertia predict virtual presence

This paper informs the debate between the impact of content and form factors on presence. From cognitive principles, we predict that the content of a VE will affect presence by interacting with expectations held by the user. Furthermore, a particular cognitive tendency (thematic inertia), should facilitate the effect of the expectations. A sample of 461 users of desktop based flight simulations was measured on ten predictors, including degree of simulation related content knowledge (generalized and specific knowledge), thematic inertia, as well as controls for age and immersion/display factors. The ITC-SOPI was the dependent variable. The data suggest that content factors explain almost as much presence variance as form (immersion) factors. As predicted, thematic inertia is a reliable predictor. Also, the degree of generality of content knowledge predicts presence (with knowledge of the specific content being an inverse predictor). This strongly suggests that the degree to which a simulation is able to match the expectations of its users is an important element of the presence experience

A connectionist explanation of presence in virtual environments

Presence has various definitions, but can be understood as the sensation that a virtual environment is a real place, that the user is actually in the virtual environment rather than at the display terminal, or that the medium used to display the environment has disappeared leaving only the environment itself. We present an attempt to unite various presence approaches by reducing each to what we believe is a common basis – the psychology of behaviour selection and control – and re-conceptualizing presence in these terms by defining cognitive presence – the mental state where the VE rather than the real environment is acting as the basis for behaviour selection. The bulk of this work represents the construction of a three-layer connectionist model to explain and predict this concept of cognitive presence. This model takes input from two major sources: the perceptual modalities of the user (bottom-up processes), and the mental state of the user (top-down processes). These two basic sources of input competitively spread activation to a central layer which competitively determines which behaviour script will be applied to regulate behaviour. We demonstrate the ability of the model to cope with current notions of presence by using it to successfully predict two published findings: one (Hendrix & Barfield, 1995) showing that presence increases with an increase in the geometric field of view of the graphical display, and another (Sallnas, 1999), which demonstrates the positive relationship between presence and the stimulation of more than one sensory modality. Apart from this theoretical analysis, we also perform two experiments to test the central tenets of our model. The first experiment aimed to show that presence is affected by both perceptual inputs (bottom-up processes), conceptual inputs (top-down processes), and the interaction of these. We collected 103 observations from a 2x2 factorial design with stimulus quality (2 levels) and conceptual priming (2 levels) as independent variables, and as dependent variable we used three measures of presence (Slater, Usoh & Steed’s scale (1995), Witmer & Singer’s (1998) Presence Questionnaire and our own cognitive presence measure) for the dependent variable. We found a significant main effect for stimulus quality and a significant interaction, which created a striking effect: priming the subject with material related in theme to the content of the VE increased the mean presence score for those viewing the high quality display, but decreased the mean of those viewing the low quality display. For those not primed with material related to the VE, no mean presence difference was discernible between those using high and low quality displays. The results from this study suggest that both top-down and bottom-up activation should be taken into account when explaining the causality of presence. Our second study aimed to show that presence comes about as a result not of raw sensory information, but rather due to partly-processed perceptual information. To do this we created a simple three group comparative design, with 78 observations. Each one of the three groups viewed the same VE under three display conditions: high-quality graphical, low-quality graphical, and text-only. Using the model, we predicted that the text and low-quality graphics displays would produce the same presence levels, while the high-quality display would outperform them both. The results were mixed, with the Slater, Usoh & Steed scale showing the predicted pattern, but the Presence Questionnaire showing each condition producing a significantly different presence score (in the increasing order: text, low-quality graphics, high-quality graphics). We conclude from our studies that the model shows the correct basic structure, but that it requires some refinement with regards to its dealings with non-immersive displays. We examined the performance our presence measure, which was found to not perform satisfactorily. We conclude by proposing some points relevant to the methodology of presence research, and by suggesting some avenues for future expansion of our model

Towards an explication of the presence effects on information processing and persuasion: A construal level framework

Dissatisfied with the existing theoretical account of the effects of presence on the mode of information processing (i.e., heuristic vs. systematic processing) and how this leads to persuasion in the context of mediated communication, the current study suggests an alternative framework that could provide an efficient and reasonable way of understanding the underlying psychological mechanism of the presence effects on persuasion. Drawing on presence theory, construal level theory, and the dual process model of persuasion, this study proposes a conceptual model that posits construal level as a key variable that mediates the effects of presence on the mode of information processing. Specifically, on the basis of the conceptual overlap between psychological distance and presence, which are respectively represented as key constructs in construal level theory and presence theory, this study proposes that a sense of presence has the potential to replace the role of psychological distance in the construal level theory and consequently prime a certain level of construal (i.e., the extent to which people’s thinking is abstract or concrete). Additionally, the conceptual similarity between the construal level in the construal level theory and the dual process model is supposed to lead people to apply the primed level of construal in processing information. In this framework, construal level is posited as a key factor that could mediate the relationship between the degree to which people experience a sense of presence and the mode of information processing. This study also attempts to provide a theoretical understanding of how this framework will serially influence the formation of trust and persuasion (i.e., behavioral intention). Guided by the empirical evidence from earlier studies, heuristic and systematic processing are predicted to respectively increase the degree to which people form affective trust towards brand and cognitive trust towards advertising product information. Consequently, persuasion is predicted to occur through both cognitive trust towards advertising product information and affective trust towards brand, as affect and cognition are intertwined. In order to validate this conceptual model, a two (ad presentation mode: video vs. text) x two (ad type: location-based advertising vs. traditional advertising) between-subjects experiment (N = 180) was conducted in a recent advertising context―i.e., location-based advertising. Consistent with the predictions based on this framework, the results showed that construal level plays a significant role in mediating the effects of presence and social presence on the mode of information processing. In addition, the amount of heuristic and systematic processing, determined by the construal level primed by a sense of presence and social presence, was positively associated with the degree to which people form affective trust towards brand and cognitive trust towards advertising product information. Consequently, both affective trust towards brand and cognitive trust towards advertising product information, formed through heuristic and systematic processing, positively influenced participants’ behavioral (purchase) intention. Through partial least squares structural equation modeling, this framework was statistically validated. Further theoretical implications of this framework are discussed

Presence 2005: the eighth annual international workshop on presence, 21-23 September, 2005 University College London (Conference proceedings)

OVERVIEW (taken from the CALL FOR PAPERS) Academics and practitioners with an interest in the concept of (tele)presence are invited to submit their work for presentation at PRESENCE 2005 at University College London in London, England, September 21-23, 2005. The eighth in a series of highly successful international workshops, PRESENCE 2005 will provide an open discussion forum to share ideas regarding concepts and theories, measurement techniques, technology, and applications related to presence, the psychological state or subjective perception in which a person fails to accurately and completely acknowledge the role of technology in an experience, including the sense of 'being there' experienced by users of advanced media such as virtual reality. The concept of presence in virtual environments has been around for at least 15 years, and the earlier idea of telepresence at least since Minsky's seminal paper in 1980. Recently there has been a burst of funded research activity in this area for the first time with the European FET Presence Research initiative. What do we really know about presence and its determinants? How can presence be successfully delivered with today's technology? This conference invites papers that are based on empirical results from studies of presence and related issues and/or which contribute to the technology for the delivery of presence. Papers that make substantial advances in theoretical understanding of presence are also welcome. The interest is not solely in virtual environments but in mixed reality environments. Submissions will be reviewed more rigorously than in previous conferences. High quality papers are therefore sought which make substantial contributions to the field. Approximately 20 papers will be selected for two successive special issues for the journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. PRESENCE 2005 takes place in London and is hosted by University College London. The conference is organized by ISPR, the International Society for Presence Research and is supported by the European Commission's FET Presence Research Initiative through the Presencia and IST OMNIPRES projects and by University College London