Telepresence and Attention: Secondary Task Reaction Time and Media Form

Attention to media has been widely studied. Often when studying attention, researchers have not distinguished to what the participants are attending – media form or media content of the presentation. This is also true of many studies on telepresence where the interaction of media form and content has been found to influence the sub-dimensions of telepresence reported by participants. However, several different elements of media form and content have been shown to be more helpful than others in bringing participants mediated worlds. In the current experiment, we use secondary task performance/reaction time (STRT) to measure attention to a media presentation and compare this attention measure to traditional self-report measures of Telepresence (Immersion, Social Reality, Spatial Presence, and Transportation) and Enjoyment. Further, we compare the STRT measure with the composite items of TelepresenceImmersion. The results indicate that STRT is a covariate, in the model with independent variables of Pace and Screen Size. Implications are discussed Keywords---Telepresence, Immersion, Attention, Secondary Task Reaction Time.