Book Description
Immersive virtual environments (IVE) allow users experience vivid sensorimotor stimuli by digitally simulating sensorimotor information. As a result, users are able to embody experiences by seeing, hearing, and feeling realistic perceptual cues linked to those experiences. Embodied experiences are defined as being surrounded by simulated sensorimotor information in mediated environments that create the sensation of personally undergoing the experience at that moment. Based on the theoretical framework of embodied cognition, which stipulates a close connection between sensorimotor experiences of the body and mental schemas, the current dissertation studies demonstrated that embodied experiences in IVEs are able to influence attitudes and behaviors in the physical, non-mediated world. Two studies explored the effect of embodied experiences on proenvironmental attitude and behavior by having participants embody the experience of cutting down a redwood tree as a result of using non-recycled paper products. Focus was also placed on investigating individual elements of embodied experiences in IVEs and the moderating effect of individual differences in the capacity to feel presence, the perception that a mediated experience is real. In both studies, actual pro-environmental behavior is observed and compared to self-reports of attitude and behavioral intention.