Sensorimotor Contagion. Virtual Literacy Bleeding Into Real-Life Perception
Have you ever tried to press CRTL + Z when making a mistake writing with pen on paper? This is an example of mistakenly applying sensorimotor skills tied to virtual literacy in real life. We frame this as a type of “contagion”.
Game scholars describe contagion as adopting game avatars’ fictional behaviors in real-life after imaginatively identifying with these avatars (Gualeni & Vella 2020). This involves a “bleed” from imaginative to real-life practices (Fisher 2024). We, instead, move away from cases of “infectious imagination” to look at contagious real interactions with virtual elements that are not part of a fictional world, such as interfaces, controlling devices, or extradiegetic background music. We focus on cases where people (want to, mistakenly) perform real-life actions based on real-life perceptual cues, because they were conditioned to connect similar cues to said actions in virtual contexts. Think of a Dark Souls player whose body tenses up, as if bracing for a fight, because they suddenly hear music start in their real-life environment (a reliable indicator of an impending boss battle in Dark Souls).
Recent work in enactivism & ecological psychology has focused on the affordances VR offers (Baggs, Grabarczyk & Rucinska 2024). To account for the contagion introduced above, we draw instead on sensorimotor enactivism (O’Regan & Noë 2001; Noë 2004; O’Regan 2011). This view treats perception as an activity mediated by knowledge of how stimuli change after interactions between perceiver and perceived object. Here, perceptual content exceeds what is given to the senses, as practical know-how is deployed in sensory interactions. We use a similar argumentative strategy to account for sensorimotor contagion introduced by virtual literacy. Given the role of sensorimotor knowledge, “real” sensorimotor virtual interactions are continuous with those in the non-virtual