From observation
to evidence.
FSRL begins with an observation
- not an explanation.
Define the environment.
Measure the response.
Separate experience from mechanism.
THE RESEARCH FRAMEWORK
ENVIRONMENT
Defined physically
(Physical / Biological / Social)
STATE
Measured physiologically
(Physiological / Autonomic / Neural)
EXPERIENCE
Documented phenomenologically
(Subjective / Cognitive / Behavioral)
FUNCTION
Tested behaviorally
(Health / Performance / Resilience)
Each layer is measured separately.
Each arrow is a hypothesis.
Define the environment before interpreting the response.
An experimental condition must be specified independently of what participants experience.
Light, sound, temperature, spatial configuration, air characteristics, visual complexity, and other environmental variables can be defined and measured before exposure.
The participant's physiological and subjective response is then treated as an outcome - not as part of the definition of the environment.
The exposure cannot be defined by the response it is intended to explain.
Define the environment
Specify the physical and sensory characteristics of the experimental condition independently of participant experience.
What exactly is being manipulated?
Explain with established mechanism
Consider ordinary physiological, psychological, behavioral, and contextual mechanisms before proposing a new explanation.
What already explains the observation?
Measure the response
Record physiological, behavioral, and subjective responses during baseline, exposure, and recovery.
What actually changes?
Test the hypothesis
Convert the remaining question into a controlled, falsifiable prediction with predefined outcomes and appropriate controls.
What result would support - or fail to support - the hypothesis?
Compare conditions
Use a credible comparison condition to distinguish the specified environmental effect from expectancy, context, and the general experience of participation.
Is the response attributable to the environment?
Replicate
Repeat the observation across sessions, participants, and, where possible, independent investigators and laboratories.
Is the response attributable to the environment?
Every layer is measured separately.
FSRL separates four levels that are often unintentionally collapsed into one another.
ENVIRONMENT
What is present?
Defined physical and sensory conditions.
Light, Sound, Acoustics, Temperature, Air / odor, Spatial configuration, Visual complexity
EXPERIENCE
What does the participant experience?
Subjective and perceptual response.
Attention, Absorption, Bodily experience, Pain, Affect, Imagery, Presence, Meaning
PHYSIOLOGICAL STATE
What changes in the body?
Measurable physiological response.
Heart rate, HRV, Respiration, Skin conductance, Peripheral temperature, Sleep-related measures
FUNCTION
Does it matter functionally?
Observable behavioral or functional consequence.
Sleep, Learning, Movement, Engagement, Task performance, Rehabilitation participation
The experience is data. It is not automatically the mechanism.
Physiological change
Something changes in the body.
Examples include changes in HRV, respiration, skin conductance, temperature, or other measurable physiological variables.
Subjective bodily experience
Something changes in how the body is experienced.
A participant may report stronger, weaker, unusual, or transformed bodily sensations.
That report is scientifically relevant phenomenological data.
Interoceptive ability
Something changes in the ability to detect or discriminate bodily signals.
This is a different experimental question.
A stronger subjective bodily sensation does not, by itself, demonstrate improved interoceptive accuracy.
FSRL does not treat subjective intensity as proof of physiological accuracy.
A TESTABLE HYPOTHESIS
Does absorption matter more than content?
Participants may enter substantially different experiential states within the same environmental condition.
The FSRL protocol therefore distinguishes between:
Trait absorption
A person's baseline tendency toward deep attentional absorption.
and
State absorption
The degree of absorption actually induced during a particular session.
RESEARCH QUESTION
Does session-specific absorption predict physiological or functional change beyond baseline physiology, baseline absorption, expectancy, and environmental condition?
Secondary question
Does the degree of absorption predict outcomes more strongly than the specific content of the participant's experience?
Important qualification
A relationship between absorption and physiological change would not, by itself, establish causation.
A subsequent experiment could manipulate attention directly to test whether absorption is causal.
From interesting observation to interpretable experiment.
The initial FSRL experiment is intentionally simple.
Participants would experience both a defined experimental environment and a credible comparison condition, with the order randomized or counterbalanced.
Measurements are collected before, during, and after exposure.
A repeat session provides an opportunity to distinguish a one-time observation from a reproducible response.
Expectation is assessed before exposure, and assessors are blinded to condition where feasible.
MEASURE WHAT THE QUESTION REQUIRES
More measurement is not necessarily better measurement.
FSRL favors a small number of well-justified measurements over an unnecessarily large instrumentation array.
The initial experiment should identify:
ONE PRIMARY OUTCOME
The principal variable against which the hypothesis will be tested.
LIMITED SECONDARY MEASURES
Additional variables that help characterize the response or evaluate plausible alternative explanations.
CONCURRENT CONTEXTUAL MEASURES
Variables needed to interpret the primary outcome correctly - for example, respiratory recording when interpreting HRV.
Define the exposure before interpreting the response.
Then:
Measure the response before explaining it.
Then:
Test the explanation before treating it as established.
Advanced tools such as EEG or neuroimaging should be introduced when a reproducible effect has been established and there is a specific question those methods can resolve.
