Presence and The Sixth Sense

This paper discusses the notion that presence may be considered as a selection mechanism that organizes the stream of sensory data into an environmental gestalt or perceptual hypothesis about current environment. A particular environmental gestalt results in scan-sensing of the world in a particular pattern reminiscent of saccades and fixations in eye scan paths. The environment hypothesis is continually reverified or else a break in presence occurs. Presence is therefore compared to visual hypothesis selection in the work of Richard Gregory and Law-rence Stark. The implications for measurement are discussed, and it is concluded that physiological measures indicating breaks in presence are worthy of study, and that the study of presence is also the study of what maintains an environmental gestalt.