C-CS

virtual experience
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Working Definition:

A virtual experience is the sensation of having an experience in effect but not in fact. It takes place by visualizing (imagining or imaging) a script assembled from the memory of past experiences. It can be accompanied by immersion, transportation or, when the sensations are vivid, by entracement.

[As employed in this study, virtual experiencing is a mental simulation of experience constructed from memories of past events in imagination. Virtual experiences made be induced by several stimuli. In the case of VR, a model of situations or locales is constructed to induce a virtual experience on the part of visitors to the site. A less immersive simulation occurs in the cinema and still less immersive simulation in TV but in both instances physical models induce virtual experiences. In the case of reading fiction, a physical iducement exists in the author's words or in illustrations but the mind or imagination has a larger role in the simulation. In the case of remembering or day-dreaming, the physical inducement is internal and the mind has the primary role in the simulation. The use of virtual experiencing refers to all of these occurences.]

Disciplinary Definitions:

Comments:

Configuring (the assemblage of the visual elements of a script given meaning by its location in a worldview) is a specific kind of virtual experience.

[Configuring is a special type of virtual experience. The simulation involved in configuring is inter-personal and the model is constructed from past experiences that are re-assembled mentally. Configuring may be induced by a VR scenario as easily as by day-dreaming. It is a visualization of an experience that occurs as a state of mind and has effects parallel to the effects of the actual experience it models. As a mode of cognition, configuring is an analogizing operation during which reassembled memories (scripts) from a particular source are mapped (projected) onto a target.]

Notes

"Instead of seeing activity in their physical surroundings, transported readers see the action of the story unfolding before them." (Green/Brock "In the Mind's Eye" 317). This nicely suggests the importance of the visual in configuring and in virtual experiences which are usually "seen" "in the mind's eye" when remembered.

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