The Illusion of Sentience in Virtual Environments
Mel Slater
University College London 
UK

A number of experimental studies have been carried out in which people are 
brought into confrontation with entirely virtual characters within an 
immersive virtual environment. These experiments have been designed to 
expore the extent to which virtual environments might be used in 
psychological therapy for anxiety conditions that involve social situations 
- in particular the social phobias and paranoid ideation. The 
results  suggest that people do respond to virtual characters as if they 
were sentient. The evidence is from questionnaire data and recorded 
physiological responses, as well as from debriefing interviews. This talk 
will review this evidence, and also pose the question of why this response 
occurs, even though the virtual characters are typically at low 
representational and behavioural fidelity.