MEASURING PRESENCE: A LITERATURE-BASED APPROACH TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF A STANDARDIZED PAPER-AND-PENCIL INSTRUMENT

Although it is the focus of a growing number of scholars in communication, computer science, psychology, and cognitive science, there is little agreement concerning the nature and measurement of presence. Marvin Minsky (1980) used the term "telepresence " to refer to teleoperation technology that provides the user with a "remote presence " in a different location via feedback systems that allow her to "see and feel what is happening " there. In 1991, the term was adapted and shortened when the journal Presence (MIT Press) was founded to provide a forum for "current research and advanced ideas on teleoperators and virtual environments. " By 1997 a review, by Lombard and Ditton identified six different conceptualizations of presence in a diverse set of literatures: presence as social richness (the "warmth " or "intimacy " possible via a medium), realism (perceptual and/or social), transportation (the sensations of "you are there, " "it is here, " and/or "we are together"), immersion (in a mediated environment), social actor within medium (e.g., parasocial interaction), and medium as social actor (e.g., treating computers as social entities). The authors incorporated all of these conceptualizations of presence into a single definition: "the perceptual illusion of nonmediation. " The term "perceptual " indicates that this phenomenon involves continuous (real time) responses of the human sensory, cognitive, and affective processing systems to objects and entities in a person's environment. An "illusion of nonmediation " occurs when a