The Experience of Presence in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Scientists working in the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission (2004–2018) reported having a sense of presence on Mars. How is this possible, given that many of the factors underlying presence in mundane situations were absent? We use Riva and Waterworth's (2014) Three-Level model to elucidate how presence was achieved. It distinguishes among proto-presence, core-presence, and extended-presence. We argue that scientists did not experience proto-presence because it requires a tight sensorimotor coupling not available due to the way the rovers were controlled and due to the lengthy delays in getting feedback. Instead, the design of the sociotechnical system made core-presence and extended-presence possible. Extended-presence involved successfully establishing long-term conceptual goals during strategic planning meetings. Core-presence involved enacting short-term tactical goals by carrying out specific actions on particular targets, abstracting away from sensorimotor details. The shift of perspective to the Martian surface was facilitated by team members “becoming the rover,” which allowed them to identify relevant affordances evident in images. We argue, however, that because Mars exploration is a collective activity involving shared agency by a distributed cognitive system, the experience of core- and extended-presence was a collective sense of presence through the rovers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it