People | Graduate Students

Satoko Kurita

Information:
Doctoral Candidate / Minor: Cognitive Science
Department of Telecommunications

skurita 'at' indiana 'dot' edu

Biography:
After working as a TV program director in a commercial television company in Japan, I became a graduate student here to study media. During my first semester I struggled with fuzzy concepts of Presence (a feeling of “being there” in virtual environment) for a final paper of Dr. Lang’s T501 (Philosophy of Science: tough but amazing). Later I pursued the topic in my Master’s thesis “Presence and Time Estimation” and the results were further analyzed with my questions over the role of emotions on Presence. Hope the results are shown in journals near future.

Now I’m working on my dissertation in which presence is one of variables which I measure while people play video games (Thanks to the ICR lab which I belong to, Xbox360 has been ready). The study examines how biological responses (e.g. Heart Rate) during repeated emotional stimuli (i.e. violence) vary as a function of individual’s motivational trait which has been found to determine considerable portion of our cognition, emotions, behaviors and possibly to affect our perception of the world. I believe that studying individual differences is important for our better understanding of media and us since the interactions between them are probably more dynamic than we have assumed.

I work closely with people in the ICR lab where I have learned a lot about how media format/contents, individual’s cognition/emotion... are interrelated to each other.