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\nContribution to the Field Communities are aging and becoming more segregated, leading to fractured relationships between generations. Intergenerational exchange has improved cohesion, particularly when different generations engage as equal partners. This paper presents a systematic review of intergenerational studies between adolescents and older adults. Thirteen papers were reviewed using PRISMA guidelines, and outcomes, methodological quality, facilitators, and barriers identified, to better understand effectiveness and inform recommendations for future practice. The framework informed quality assessment, and the papers were rated moderate or high quality. Unfortunately, heterogeneity across studies rendered comparison challenging. Further attention is required to elucidate guidelines for implementing and reporting intergenerational studies. This review demonstrated how non-familial intergenerational programs involving adolescents and older adults provided benefits to both. Benefits for older adults included improved wellbeing, cognitive, and social engagement. Benefits for adolescents were identity formation and skill development. Shared outcomes for both generations were improved attitudes and stereotypes, reduced generational gap, and solidarity. High variability in program design, methodology, and sample size was evident across studies. However, it highlighted the suitability of IG engagement across differing contexts. Future recommendations included facilitator training, diverse samples, and longitudinal methodological designs. This review demonstrated how non-familial intergenerational programs involving adolescents and older adults provided benefits to both. Benefits for older adults included improved wellbeing, cognitive, and social engagement.Benefits for adolescents were identity formation and skill development. Shared outcomes for both generations were improved attitudes and stereotypes, reduced generational gap, and solidarity.High variability in program design, methodology, and sample size was evident across studies. However, it highlighted the suitability of IG engagement across differing contexts.Future recommendations included facilitator training, diverse samples, and longitudinal methodological designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs about social Networking is organizing a special issue dedicated to the applications, limitations and future potential of different varieties of digital travel. Topics include COVID-19 reduced the feasibility and attractiveness of travel for a great many people in all age groups; and Travel has a serious negative impact on the environment, the deterioration of which is seen as an increasingly urgent problem.

Abstract: Recent research in neuroscience has tried to understand human action from two different but converging perspectives: the cognitive and the volitional. On one side, cognitive studies analyze how action is planned and controlled in response to environmental conditions. On the other side, volitional studies analyze how action is planned and controlled by a subject''s needs, motives and goals. In this paper we suggest that the notion of presence may be the missing link between these two approaches, explaining how can we differentiate between perception, action and concepts. In particular, a consideration of presence can explain how can we distinguish between a perceived action, a planned or an executed one. We argue that the evolutionary role of presence is the control of agency through the unconscious separation of “internal” and “external” and the enaction/reenaction of intentions. The model makes sense in terms of evolutionary psychology and is beginning to be supported by evidence of the neural and other physical correlates of action, imitation and self-monitoring. Another strength of this model is that it provides testable predictions about how to improve the experience of presence in media: maximal presence in a mediated experience arises from an optimal combination of form and content, able to support the intentions of the user. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article discusses the sense of presence which tells the extent to which human takes conscious attention on the outside world rather than the internal world of thoughts and imagination. It states that the sense of presence has gained interest through the years due to the use of interactive virtual reality environments. Furthermore, it mentions that the sense of presence was made by evolution for organisms to know when they are attending to things that might affect their survival.

This paper proposes a bio-cultural theory of presence based on four different positions related to the role and structure of presence, as follows. First, presence is a defining feature of self and it is related to the evolution of a key feature of any central nervous system: the embedding of sensory-referred properties into an internal functional space. Without the emergence of the sense of presence it is impossible for the nervous system to experience distal attribution: the referencing of our perception to an external space beyond the limits of the sensory organs themselves. Second, even if the experience of the sense of presence is a unitary feeling, conceptually it can be divided in three different layers, phylogenetically different and strictly related to the three levels of self identified by Damasio. In particular we can make conceptual distinctions between proto presence (self vs. non self), core presence (self vs. present external world), and extended presence (self relative to present external world). Third, given that each layer of presence solves a particular facet of the internal/external world separation, it is characterized by specific properties. Finally, in humans the sense of presence is a direct function of these three layers: the more they are integrated, the more we are present. In the experience of optimal presence, biologically and culturally determined cognitive processes are working in harmony—to focus all levels of the self on a significant situation in the external world, whether this is real or virtual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A model of virtual/physical experience is presented, which provides a three dimensional conceptual space for virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) comprising the dimensions of focus, locus, and sensus. Focus is most closely related to what is generally termed presence in the VR literature. When in a virtual environment, presence is typically shared between the VR and the physical world. "Breaks in presence" are actually shifts of presence away from the VR and toward the external environment. But we can also have "breaks in presence" when attention moves toward absence - when an observer is not attending to stimuli present in the virtual environment, nor to stimuli present in the surrounding physical environment - when the observer is present in neither the virtual nor the physical world. We thus have two dimensions of presence: focus of attention (between presence and absence) and the locus of attention (the virtual vs. the physical world). A third dimension is the sensus of attention - the level of arousal determining whether the observer is highly conscious or relatively unconscious while interacting with the environment. After expanding on each of these three dimensions of experience in relation to VR, we present a couple of educational examples as illustrations, and also relate our model to a suggested spectrum of evaluation methods for virtual environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes the design and evaluation of two types of selector tool for use in medical virtual reality applications. Details on the background behind the research; How the tools were evaluated; Results obtained; Focus on design aspects of selector tools for use in medical surgery planning.

Posits that computer-based multimedia should be considered `synaesthetic media' due to their capacity to translate between modes of sensory perception. Changing face of the human-computer interface; Synaesthesia, creativity and multimedia computer tools; Synaesthetic media for human creativity.