Construct · 6 names · 12 citations
Different names. Different fields. One construct. One map.
● jangle · five names, one experience, partly Nearest construct by meaningpresencecompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to flow is presence.
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A state of total involvement in an activity, entered when the challenge of the task and the skill of the person are both high and matched. Csikszentmihalyi named it in 1975 from interviews with rock climbers, chess players, surgeons, and dancers who described the experience as being carried along; the 1990 book made it the centrepiece of optimal experience, and Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi listed the components in 2002: clear goals, immediate feedback, challenge–skill balance, merged action and awareness, concentration, sense of control, loss of self-consciousness, distorted time, and autotelic experience. Jackson and Marsh fixed those nine into the 36-item Flow State Scale in 1996 for sport. The construct is a state of a person doing something, and the challenge–skill balance is the condition that makes it flow rather than mere absorption.[1][2][3]
A state of deep involvement with software, defined by Agarwal and Karahanna in 2000 through five dimensions: temporal dissociation, focused immersion, heightened enjoyment, control, and curiosity. They built it explicitly from three sources (Tellegen's trait absorption, Csikszentmihalyi's flow, and cognitive engagement) and showed it raised perceived usefulness and ease of use in the technology acceptance model, with the World Wide Web as the technology. Hoffman and Novak had already brought flow into marketing in 1996 as the state that keeps a consumer navigating a website. The IS construct keeps flow's symptoms and drops its cause: nothing in the scale asks whether the challenge matched the skill, and the criterion is an intention to use, not an optimal experience.[5][6]
The subjective sense of being in the place a display depicts rather than the room the body is in. Slater and Wilbur separated it in 1997 from immersion, which they reserved for objective properties of the technology (how inclusive, extensive, surrounding, and vivid the display is) so that presence is the psychological response and immersion the stimulus. Witmer and Singer defined presence a year later as the experience of being in one environment while physically in another, tied it to attention and involvement, and built the Presence Questionnaire to measure it. Presence is about location, not about task: a person can feel entirely present in a virtual room while bored, which no flow scale would count.[7][8]
The degree of involvement a player has with a game, treated as graded rather than all-or-nothing. Brown and Cairns interviewed gamers in 2004 and found three levels (engagement, engrossment, and total immersion) each gated by a barrier the player has to pass, from learning the controls to losing awareness of the surroundings. Jennett and colleagues built an immersion questionnaire in 2008, showed that immersion can be read from eye movements and from how long it takes to return to a real-world task, and argued that immersion differs from flow because it can be a suboptimal experience: a player can be deeply immersed and frustrated. It differs from presence because the game need not depict a place. The unit is a player, and the criterion is the cost of pulling them out.[9][10]
The motion of a fluid, which Reynolds showed in 1883 comes in two regimes: direct, or laminar, where dye injected into a pipe travels in a straight thread, and sinuous, or turbulent, where it breaks into eddies. The transition depends on a single dimensionless number combining velocity, diameter, and viscosity, and the law of resistance changes with it. Csikszentmihalyi's respondents described their experience as being carried by a current, and the metaphor is laminar flow, smooth, effortless, and stable. It is only a metaphor: nothing in the psychological construct has a Reynolds number, and the fluid meaning measures pressure drop, not people.[12]
A disposition to have episodes of total attention that fully engage one's representational resources, so that the object of attention seems heightened and the rest of the world recedes. Tellegen and Atkinson fixed it in 1974 as a personality trait, found it correlated with hypnotic susceptibility, and separated it from the stability and introversion factors of the day; it later became a scale on the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire and a marker of openness to experience. Absorption is a property of a person, stable over years, and predicts who enters the states the other four fields measure. A flow score and an absorption score are one experience seen from two distances.[11]
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