Revisiting the Heider and Simmel experiment for social meaning attribution in virtual reality

Abstract

In their seminal experiment in 1944, Heider and Simmel revealed that humans have a pronounced tendency to impose narrative meaning even in the presence of simple animations of geometric shapes. Despite the shapes having no discernible features or emotions, participants attributed strong social context, meaningful interactions, and even emotions to them. This experiment, run on traditional 2D displays has since had a significant impact on fields ranging from psychology to narrative storytelling. Virtual Reality (VR), on the other hand, offers a significantly new viewing paradigm, a fundamentally different type of experience with the potential to enhance presence, engagement and immersion. In this work, we explore and analyze to what extent the findings of the original experiment by Heider and Simmel carry over into a VR setting. We replicate such experiment in both traditional 2D displays and with a head mounted display (HMD) in VR, and use both subjective (questionnaire-based) and objective (eye-tracking) metrics to record the observers’ visual behavior. We perform a thorough analysis of this data, and propose novel metrics for assessing the observers’ visual behavior. Our questionnaire-based results suggest that participants who viewed the animation through a VR headset developed stronger emotional connections with the geometric shapes than those who viewed it on a traditional 2D screen. Additionally, the analysis of our eye-tracking data indicates that participants who watched the animation in VR exhibited fewer shifts in gaze, suggesting greater engagement with the action. However, we did not find evidence of differences in how subjects perceived the roles of the shapes, with both groups interpreting the animation’s plot at the same level of accuracy. Our findings may have important implications for future psychological research using VR, especially regarding our understanding of social cognition and emotions.