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The Binding Problem in Presence Research

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The Binding Problem in Presence Research FORUM The Binding Problem in Presence Research Abstract the extent to which people respond and act within a VE as if it were real—where response is taken at every level An important contributor to the feeling of being present is from physiological to cognitive (Sanchez-Vives & Slater, the unity of one’s perceptual experience. That is, the con- 2005). stellation of sensorial cues in a virtual environment must be On the face of it, it would seem to be highly unlikely in accord with some basic rules which, in the real world, that the brain mechanisms serving such a basic process govern the relationship between sensory events. A similar would be different in or out of a VE. That is, the same and long standing problem in neuroscience is how is it that processes responsible for generating responses and be- the temporally and spatially segregated activity in neuronal haviors corresponding to sensory stimuli in the real ensembles is reassembled in order to generate a seamless world should also be at work in a virtual setting. As peo- conscious experience. This issue, which was first addressed ple move about their environment—virtual or other- by the Gestalt psychologists, is commonly referred to as the wise—they are continuously bombarded with disparate binding problem. In this paper we will discuss how the streams of sensory input that must somehow be reas- problem of binding is related to the problem of presence, sembled into a coherent whole. The problem of how and how the study of the neurophysiological substrates the brain effortlessly uses spatially and temporally segre- subserving this process may lead to an understanding of gated activity in neuronal ensembles to form a unified contextual relationships critical to generating presence in perception is broadly defined as the bindingproblem. virtual environments. Since the goal of presence research is to understand how to achieve a unified perception in the context of a VE, the question arises: To what extent is presence related to binding? This is especially interesting because a naı¨ve 1 Introduction belief would be that very high realism in a VE is re- quired for the achievement of high presence. Anecdot- In an effort to understand the neurological pro- ally it is known that this is not the case, and there is cesses that are necessary and sufficient for the induction some experimental evidence indicating that high visual of presence in virtual environments (VE) we considered realism is not a necessary condition (Zimmons & Pan- whether or not we needed a unique and new definition ter, 2003). If presence can be subsumed under the con- specifically for VEs, or whether these processes could be cept of binding, this would also help to explain why legitimately studied in an existing framework using tra- high realism is not a requirement. ditional methods. Most definitions of presence echo the The study of the binding problem arose from the common theme that presence is the sense of “being work of the Gestalt psychologists who were interested in there” (Held & Durlach, 1992; Sheridan, 1992) or the what rules governed object perception. Prior to Gestalt “subjective experience of being in one place or environ- theory it was widely believed that perception was ment, even when one is physically situated in another” (Witmer & Singer, 1998). A critical review of the con- cept can be found in Draper, Kaber, and Usher (1998) and a more recent review of the literature and experi- Michael A. Harvey mental evidence considers presence operationally to be Maria V. Sanchez-Vives* Instituto de Neurociencias de Alicante Universidad Miguel Herna´ndez-CSIC Campus de San Juan Apartado 18 Vol. 14, No. 5, October 2005, Presence, 616–621 03550 San Juan de Alicante, Spain © 2005 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology *Correspondence to [email protected] 616 PRESENCE: VOLUME 14, NUMBER 5 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105474605774918714 by guest on 26 September 2021 Harvey and Sanchez-Vives 617 achieved by summing individual elements (sensations) several examples where this would appear to be the case. in order to form a percept. However, structuralist ideas Here is one: Imagine you are reaching out to touch a could not explain the perception of non-existent ele- wall, and before you see your finger connect with the ments such as those that occur during apparent motion wall you feel a contact. This task requires the binding (Wertheimer, 1923). This led to the now classic idea together of somatosensory, proprioceptive, and visual that our perception is not solely governed by the sum- information. The early contact disrupts this process and mation of discrete areas of neuronal activity, but rather simultaneously would almost surely disrupt our pres- by some emergent property generated by the unique ence. A more extreme form of this happens in virtual spatio-temporal constellation of that activity. Thus in its reality in nearly every experience. A person reaches out broadest sense the binding problem can subsume many to touch something, or collides with some object—and cognitive functions, and ultimately may be a question of there is zero contact feeling associated with this, be- consciousness (Sanchez-Vives & Slater, 2005). These cause of a lack of haptic feedback. However, it should functions include: perceptual binding, the binding of hold true that conditions that do not disrupt binding stimuli within a sensory modality, for example, object are less likely to impact presence than those that do. For form with object color; multimodal binding, the bind- example, incongruous stimuli should be more disruptive ing of stimuli between modalities, for example, the im- than the absence of a stimuli. Why should this be? It is age and sound of a bat striking a ball; and temporal well known that in the absence of stimuli the brain is binding, the binding of events over time, for example, quite capable of doing a substantial amount of filling in object motion. For instance the proper perception of a (Ramachandran & Gregory, 1991). A good example is virtual baseball game includes all of the aforementioned the blind spot generated in the visual field by the optic elements. We use perceptual binding to bind the visual disc where the ganglion cell axons exit the eye. The scene, that is, the brown belongs to the bat, the white brain continuously interpolates the visual scene and fills to the ball, the uniform to the player, and so on; multi- in this blind spot such that, normally, we are unaware of modal binding lets us place the sound of the bat striking its presence. Following this logic if one were in a virtual the ball with the visual image of the event; and temporal environment, and bent over to smell a virtual rose, it binding grants us a perception of the ball moving should be less disruptive for the rose to have no smell smoothly through space, and not jumping from one than the wrong smell. When we see a rose we cogni- point to another. tively bind our visual representation of the rose to what Another type of binding, that may in fact be the most we know about roses. There is plenty of anecdotal evi- important to presence research, is cognitive binding. A dence to suggest that many people will claim to experi- key element of cognitive binding is related to the fact ence the smell of a rose when there is none actually gen- that the rules governing the way in which a percept is erated. A wrong smell would interfere with this process formed can be learned. In most cases there is a remark- whereas no smell would not, or at least not to the same able consistency in the relationships between external degree. While this seems to be intuitively obvious, it has and perceptual events, with these relationships being not been tested, but is one of the predictions we would reinforced throughout the entirety of our perceptual make based on this model. lives. Thus when perceptual events are not in agree- If it is true that presence bears some relation to how ment, either with each other or with expectations based successfully we can bind the sensory and cognitive ele- on prior experience, for example a very small girl speak- ments of a virtual environment, then an understanding ing in a very deep voice, it produces in us a feeling of of the neurophysiological mechanisms responsible for surprise or consternation, and in a virtual reality space, a binding should be important to our understanding, and break in presence (Slater & Steed, 2000). our ability to control, presence. The ultimate cellular Does this then imply that some breaks in presence are and network mechanisms underlying the binding pro- really failures of binding? Anecdotally we can think of cesses taking place in the brain are still a matter of dis- Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105474605774918714 by guest on 26 September 2021 618 PRESENCE: VOLUME 14, NUMBER 5 cussion, and they will probably not be resolved any time found (Logothetis & Sheinberg, 1996; Tanaka, 1997) soon. However, we believe that there are some concepts the catch is in the combinatorial explosion in the num- emerging from this basic neuroscience research from ber of different percepts that need to be represented. It which one could generate hypotheses about perception is likely that we simply do not have enough cells to ac- and cognitive processes and how this relates to presence. count for the near infinite number of perceptual possi- bilities. This early work provided us with the conceptual building blocks for higher order perceptual processes; 2 Hierarchical Processing but whether the blocks are held together by cardinal cells or by other mechanisms is still an open question.
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