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Affective processes appraise the salience of external stimuli preparing the agent for action. So far, the relationship between stimuli, affect, and action has been mainly studied in highly controlled laboratory conditions. In order to find the generalization of this relationship to social interaction, we assess the influence of the salience of social stimuli on human interaction. We constructed reality ball game in a mixed reality space where pairs of people collaborated in order to compete with an opposing team. We coupled the players with team members with varying social salience by using both physical and virtual representations of remote players (i.e., avatars). We observe that, irrespective of the team composition, winners and losers display significantly different inter- and intrateam spatial behaviors. We show that subjects regulate their interpersonal distance to both virtual and physical team members in similar ways, but in proportion to the vividness of the stimulus. As an independent validation of this social salience effect, we show that this behavioral effect is also displayed in physiological correlates of arousal. In addition, we found a strong correlation between performance, physiology, and the subjective reports of the subjects. Our results show that proxemics is consistent with affective responses, confirming the existence of a social salience effect. This provides further support for the so-called law of apparent reality, and it generalizes it to the social realm, where it can be used to design more efficient social artifacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the architecture of mixed reality spaces is becoming increasingly more complex, our understanding of human behavior in such spaces is still limited. Despite the sophisticated methods deployed in ethology and behavioral biology to track and analyze the actions and movements of animals, we rarely find studies that focus on the understanding of human behavior using such instruments. Here, we address this issue by analyzing social behavior and physical actions of multiple humans who are engaging in a game. As a paradigm of social interaction, we constructed a mixed reality football game in which two teams of two players have to cooperate and compete in order to win. This paradigm was deployed in the, so-called, eXperience Induction Machine (XIM), a human accessible, fully instrumented space that supports full body interaction in mixed reality without the need for body-mounted sensors. Our results show that winning and losing strategies can be discerned by specific behavioral patterns and proxemics. This demonstrates that mixed reality systems such as XIM provide new paradigms for the investigation of human social behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: With the advance of novel brain imaging technology more correlations between complex human properties and the neuronal substrate can be assessed. However, thus far, not many well-validated paradigms exist that would allow for a systematic and quantitative exploration of these phenomena. For instance, despite the rapid technological advances in the domain of mixed and virtual reality systems, a fundamental issue remains how we can define and quantify “presence”. A standard approach has been to use questionnaires and self-report measures. However, it has been well established that humans’ capabilities to access and externalize their internal states are limited. Hence, we have investigated the question whether other less subjective measures can be devised that can corroborate subjective self-reports on presence. In particular, we have developed a quantitative recollection task that assesses the ability of human subjects (N =40) to recollect the factual structure and organization of a structured and fully controlled experience in a human accessible mixed reality space, the eXperience Induction Machine (XIM). In this structured experience – referred to as the “Autodemo” – a virtual guide explains the key elements and properties of XIM while the user is able to freely move around in the space. To evaluate the users’ experience and the amount of factual information retained about the Autodemo, we used the ITC-SOPI questionnaire and a recall test specifically designed for the Autodemo. We found significant correlations between spatial presence and engagement factors of ITC-SOPI and recall performance. Moreover we observed an interaction with the participants’ gender. Our results show that we can assess correlates of “presence” by focusing on other dependent measures such as those related to memory and performance. Additionally, our work exemplifies how virtual and mixed reality systems provide new ways to address fundamental questions in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]