Refine
Has Fulltext
- yes (37) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (37)
Year of publication
Document Type
- Journal article (37) (remove)
Language
- English (37)
Keywords
- virtual reality (37) (remove)
Institute
- Institut für Informatik (16)
- Institut für Psychologie (13)
- Institut Mensch - Computer - Medien (8)
- Institut für Allgemeinmedizin (2)
- Institut für Pädagogik (1)
- Institut für Sportwissenschaft (1)
- Klinik und Poliklinik für Anästhesiologie (ab 2004) (1)
- Medizinische Fakultät (1)
- Neurologische Klinik und Poliklinik (1)
Sonstige beteiligte Institutionen
EU-Project number / Contract (GA) number
- 824128 (2)
Investigating approach-avoidance behavior regarding affective stimuli is important in broadening the understanding of one of the most common psychiatric disorders, social anxiety disorder. Many studies in this field rely on approach-avoidance tasks, which mainly assess hand movements, or interpersonal distance measures, which return inconsistent results and lack ecological validity. Therefore, the present study introduces a virtual reality task, looking at avoidance parameters (movement time and speed, distance to social stimulus, gaze behavior) during whole-body movements. These complex movements represent the most ecologically valid form of approach and avoidance behavior. These are at the core of complex and natural social behavior. With this newly developed task, the present study examined whether high socially anxious individuals differ in avoidance behavior when bypassing another person, here virtual humans with neutral and angry facial expressions. Results showed that virtual bystanders displaying angry facial expressions were generally avoided by all participants. In addition, high socially anxious participants generally displayed enhanced avoidance behavior towards virtual people, but no specifically exaggerated avoidance behavior towards virtual people with a negative facial expression. The newly developed virtual reality task proved to be an ecological valid tool for research on complex approach-avoidance behavior in social situations. The first results revealed that whole body approach-avoidance behavior relative to passive bystanders is modulated by their emotional facial expressions and that social anxiety generally amplifies such avoidance.
Stronger reactivity to social gaze in virtual reality compared to a classical laboratory environment
(2021)
People show a robust tendency to gaze at other human beings when viewing images or videos, but were also found to relatively avoid gaze at others in several real‐world situations. This discrepancy, along with theoretical considerations, spawned doubts about the appropriateness of classical laboratory‐based experimental paradigms in social attention research. Several researchers instead suggested the use of immersive virtual scenarios in eliciting and measuring naturalistic attentional patterns, but the field, struggling with methodological challenges, still needs to establish the advantages of this approach. Here, we show using eye‐tracking in a complex social scenario displayed in virtual reality that participants show enhanced attention towards the face of an avatar at near distance and demonstrate an increased reactivity towards her social gaze as compared to participants who viewed the same scene on a computer monitor. The present study suggests that reactive virtual agents observed in immersive virtual reality can elicit natural modes of information processing and can help to conduct ecologically more valid experiments while maintaining high experimental control.
Virtual reality (VR) has made its way into mainstream psychological research in the last two decades. This technology, with its unique ability to simulate complex, real situations and contexts, offers researchers unprecedented opportunities to investigate human behavior in well controlled designs in the laboratory. One important application of VR is the investigation of pathological processes in mental disorders, especially anxiety disorders. Research on the processes underlying threat perception, fear, and exposure therapy has shed light on more general aspects of the relation between perception and emotion. Being by its nature virtual, i.e., simulation of reality, VR strongly relies on the adequate selection of specific perceptual cues to activate emotions. Emotional experiences in turn are related to presence, another important concept in VR, which describes the user's sense of being in a VR environment. This paper summarizes current research into perception of fear cues, emotion, and presence, aiming at the identification of the most relevant aspects of emotional experience in VR and their mutual relations. A special focus lies on a series of recent experiments designed to test the relative contribution of perception and conceptual information on fear in VR. This strand of research capitalizes on the dissociation between perception (bottom up input) and conceptual information (top-down input) that is possible in VR. Further, we review the factors that have so far been recognized to influence presence, with emotions (e.g., fear) being the most relevant in the context of clinical psychology. Recent research has highlighted the mutual influence of presence and fear in VR, but has also traced the limits of our current understanding of this relationship. In this paper, the crucial role of perception on eliciting emotional reactions is highlighted, and the role of arousal as a basic dimension of emotional experience is discussed. An interoceptive attribution model of presence is suggested as a first step toward an integrative framework for emotion research in VR. Gaps in the current literature and future directions are outlined.
Psycho-pathological conditions, such as depression or schizophrenia, are often accompanied by a distorted perception of time. People suffering from this conditions often report that the passage of time slows down considerably and that they are “stuck in time.” Virtual Reality (VR) could potentially help to diagnose and maybe treat such mental conditions. However, the conditions in which a VR simulation could correctly diagnose a time perception deviation are still unknown. In this paper, we present an experiment investigating the difference in time experience with and without a virtual body in VR, also known as avatar. The process of substituting a person’s body with a virtual body is called avatar embodiment. Numerous studies demonstrated interesting perceptual, emotional, behavioral, and psychological effects caused by avatar embodiment. However, the relations between time perception and avatar embodiment are still unclear. Whether or not the presence or absence of an avatar is already influencing time perception is still open to question. Therefore, we conducted a between-subjects design with and without avatar embodiment as well as a real condition (avatar vs. no-avatar vs. real). A group of 105 healthy subjects had to wait for seven and a half minutes in a room without any distractors (e.g., no window, magazine, people, decoration) or time indicators (e.g., clocks, sunlight). The virtual environment replicates the real physical environment. Participants were unaware that they will be asked to estimate their waiting time duration as well as describing their experience of the passage of time at a later stage. Our main finding shows that the presence of an avatar is leading to a significantly faster perceived passage of time. It seems to be promising to integrate avatar embodiment in future VR time-based therapy applications as they potentially could modulate a user’s perception of the passage of time. We also found no significant difference in time perception between the real and the VR conditions (avatar, no-avatar), but further research is needed to better understand this outcome.
With the rise of immersive media, advertisers have started to use 360° commercials to engage and persuade consumers. Two experiments were conducted to address research gaps and to validate the positive impact of 360° commercials in realistic settings. The first study (N = 62) compared the effects of 360° commercials using either a mobile cardboard head-mounted display (HMD) or a laptop. This experiment was conducted in the participants’ living rooms and incorporated individual feelings of cybersickness as a moderator. The participants who experienced the 360° commercial with the HMD reported higher spatial presence and product evaluation, but their purchase intentions were only increased when their reported cybersickness was low. The second experiment (N = 197) was conducted online and analyzed the impact of 360° commercials that were experienced with mobile (smartphone/tablet) or static (laptop/desktop) devices instead of HMDs. The positive effects of omnidirectional videos were stronger when participants used mobile devices.
Interpreting blood gas analysis results can be challenging for the clinician, especially in stressful situations under time pressure. To foster fast and correct interpretation of blood gas results, we developed Visual Blood. This computer-based, multicentre, noninferiority study compared Visual Blood and conventional arterial blood gas (ABG) printouts. We presented six scenarios to anaesthesiologists, once with Visual Blood and once with the conventional ABG printout. The primary outcome was ABG parameter perception. The secondary outcomes included correct clinical diagnoses, perceived diagnostic confidence, and perceived workload. To analyse the results, we used mixed models and matched odds ratios. Analysing 300 within-subject cases, we showed noninferiority of Visual Blood compared to ABG printouts concerning the rate of correctly perceived ABG parameters (rate ratio, 0.96; 95% CI, 0.92–1.00; p = 0.06). Additionally, the study revealed two times higher odds of making the correct clinical diagnosis using Visual Blood (OR, 2.16; 95% CI, 1.42–3.29; p < 0.001) than using ABG printouts. There was no or, respectively, weak evidence for a difference in diagnostic confidence (OR, 0.84; 95% CI, 0.58–1.21; p = 0.34) and perceived workload (Coefficient, 2.44; 95% CI, −0.09–4.98; p = 0.06). This study showed that participants did not perceive the ABG parameters better, but using Visual Blood resulted in more correct clinical diagnoses than using conventional ABG printouts. This suggests that Visual Blood allows for a higher level of situation awareness beyond individual parameters’ perception. However, the study also highlighted the limitations of today’s virtual reality headsets and Visual Blood.