Research Using Virtual Reality: What are the Benefits, Challenges, and Potentials?

Virtual reality (VR) enables the simulation of worlds in a computer-generated environment. Over the past years, the technology of VR has been refined as VR headset screens improved both in their resolution and their fields of view. Furthermore, improvements in computer hardware and 3D software also facilitate a higher degree of realism in VR. Meanwhile, VR has become a widely used tool in scientific research. VR offers new ways of standardization as stimuli are presented without any visual influences from the laboratory. Additionally, VR environments are fully customizable to the needs of the research question. However, these customizations require additional skills, such as the creation of three-dimensional models or programming events in VR. Nevertheless, VR gives rise to new ways of measuring humans behavior. For example, the position of the VR headset inside the virtual world can be used to measure humans’ movement in VR and modern VR headsets also allow eye-tracking measurements. This allows VR to measure subtle behaviors that are difficult to measure in real life. These and other potentials and challenges in VR research are discussed within the context of possible research questions in psychology

Denial of Death? Death-Related Words are Suppressed in a Think/No-Think Paradigm

According to terror management theory, humans automatically suppress the thought of death when reminded of their mortality (mortality salience; MS), leading to a hyper- accessibility of death-related thoughts under MS. Here, we tested the claim of automatic death-thought-suppression using a think/no-think paradigm. Participants were reminded of death or a painful tooth treatment (control) before learning word associations between cue words and neutral, negative, or death-related target words. First analyses indicate that in the study phase, participants under MS performed worse in acquiring the target words. In the test phase, these general performance differences disappeared. However, death-related words were generally remembered worse than negative words, but better with multiple attempts of suppression under MS. This effect stands in line with the assumption of suppressed thoughts becoming hyper-accessible. Participants in the control group did remember less death-related words than participants under MS. This effect hints at an automatic thought suppression of death-thoughts

God is up and devil is down: mortality salience increases implicit spatial-religious associations

Most Christians in Western cultures associate God with upper space and devil with lower space. Measuring this spatial association captures the implicit metaphorical representations of religious concepts. Previous studies have shown that implicit measurements of the belief in God increase when people are confronted with their own mortality. Here we investigated the effect of mortality salience on implicit metaphorical representations of religiosity. Using a repeated measurement design, we found that implicit associations between God-up and devil-down increase when people think about their own death, but not when they think about a tooth treatment (control condition). The effect was moderated by self-esteem; only people with low and medium self-esteem were influenced by mortality salience. Our results show that mortality salience automatically activates religious contents and their cognitive representations that embody these abstract contents

Nucleocytoplasmic transport: a thermodynamic mechanism

The nuclear pore supports molecular communication between cytoplasm and nucleus in eukaryotic cells. Selective transport of proteins is mediated by soluble receptors, whose regulation by the small GTPase Ran leads to cargo accumulation in, or depletion from the nucleus, i.e., nuclear import or nuclear export. We consider the operation of this transport system by a combined analytical and experimental approach. Provocative predictions of a simple model were tested using cell-free nuclei reconstituted in Xenopus egg extract, a system well suited to quantitative studies. We found that accumulation capacity is limited, so that introduction of one import cargo leads to egress of another. Clearly, the pore per se does not determine transport directionality. Moreover, different cargo reach a similar ratio of nuclear to cytoplasmic concentration in steady-state. The model shows that this ratio should in fact be independent of the receptor-cargo affinity, though kinetics may be strongly influenced. Numerical conservation of the system components highlights a conflict between the observations and the popular concept of transport cycles. We suggest that chemical partitioning provides a framework to understand the capacity to generate concentration gradients by equilibration of the receptor-cargo intermediary.Comment: in press at HFSP Journal, vol 3 16 text pages, 1 table, 4 figures, plus Supplementary Material include

Event-related alpha suppression in response to facial motion

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.While biological motion refers to both face and body movements, little is known about the visual perception of facial motion. We therefore examined alpha wave suppression as a reduction in power is thought to reflect visual activity, in addition to attentional reorienting and memory processes. Nineteen neurologically healthy adults were tested on their ability to discriminate between successive facial motion captures. These animations exhibited both rigid and non-rigid facial motion, as well as speech expressions. The structural and surface appearance of these facial animations did not differ, thus participants decisions were based solely on differences in facial movements. Upright, orientation-inverted and luminance-inverted facial stimuli were compared. At occipital and parieto-occipital regions, upright facial motion evoked a transient increase in alpha which was then followed by a significant reduction. This finding is discussed in terms of neural efficiency, gating mechanisms and neural synchronization. Moreover, there was no difference in the amount of alpha suppression evoked by each facial stimulus at occipital regions, suggesting early visual processing remains unaffected by manipulation paradigms. However, upright facial motion evoked greater suppression at parieto-occipital sites, and did so in the shortest latency. Increased activity within this region may reflect higher attentional reorienting to natural facial motion but also involvement of areas associated with the visual control of body effectors. © 2014 Girges et al

What Happens in Between? Human Oscillatory Brain Activity Related to Crossmodal Spatial Cueing

Previous studies investigated the effects of crossmodal spatial attention by comparing the responses to validly versus invalidly cued target stimuli. Dynamics of cortical rhythms in the time interval between cue and target might contribute to cue effects on performance. Here, we studied the influence of spatial attention on ongoing oscillatory brain activity in the interval between cue and target onset. In a first experiment, subjects underwent periods of tactile stimulation (cue) followed by visual stimulation (target) in a spatial cueing task as well as tactile stimulation as a control. In a second experiment, cue validity was modified to be 50%, 75%, or else 25%, to separate effects of exogenous shifts of attention caused by tactile stimuli from that of endogenous shifts. Tactile stimuli produced: 1) a stronger lateralization of the sensorimotor beta-rhythm rebound (15–22 Hz) after tactile stimuli serving as cues versus not serving as cues; 2) a suppression of the occipital alpha-rhythm (7–13 Hz) appearing only in the cueing task (this suppression was stronger contralateral to the endogenously attended side and was predictive of behavioral success); 3) an increase of prefrontal gamma-activity (25–35 Hz) specifically in the cueing task. We measured cue-related modulations of cortical rhythms which may accompany crossmodal spatial attention, expectation or decision, and therefore contribute to cue validity effects. The clearly lateralized alpha suppression after tactile cues in our data indicates its dependence on endogenous rather than exogenous shifts of visuo-spatial attention following a cue independent of its modality

Does Mortality priming increase religious thinking? Evidence from implicit spatial-religious associations

According to Terror Management Theory, people manage their fear of death by defending their cultural worldview, and values of that worldview are typically strengthened when confronted with death. An interesting case is religious believes, for which an increase or decrease has been found depending on the prior religiousness and level of assessment (explicit or implicit). In this study (n = 135) we further assessed the impact of mortality salience on implicit religious believes using an implicit association test (IAT) assessing the link between vertical space and deity (good-up, devil down). We found that implicit associations increased when people think about their own death, but not when they think about a tooth treatment. Moreover, the increase in the IAT-effect was higher for people with a lower self-esteem. Making use of a metaphorical spatial association, this study provides further support for an increase in implicit religiousness when thinking about one’s own dead

distrACTION - Calculating and Plotting Distributions

A jamovi module (www.jamovi.org) for calculating and plotting the cumulative distribution function (CDF) and the quantile function (Inverse CFD) for a number of discrete and continuous distributions

How Mortality Salience Influences Time Perception in Time Estimations and Time Reproductions

Previous research has shown that subjective time changes under mortality salience (MS, i.e., awareness of one’s mortality). We wanted to reproduce the effect of time expansion during short time spans by means of a repeated measures design, using both time estimations and time reproductions. Participants were presented neutral stimuli for durations between 1s and 7.5s before and after being primed by MS or a control topic. Participants were then asked to reproduce and estimate each time span. People with medium and high self-esteem reproduce longer durations more accurately under MS than controls. These results show a reversal of Vierordt's law after priming with MS as a function of self-esteem. The chosen methods of prospective time reproduction and time estimation differ significantly. No effect was found for time estimation under MS. This finding adds to the growing evidence that thoughts about mortality exert a specific influence on cognitive functions