Do humans behave in virtual reality the same way they do in real life?

Tuesday, 24 de November de 2020

Virtual reality (VR) was made to mimic the experiences humans have in real life. In this regard, the use of VR has been rising in scientific research to better understand humans cognition, decision making and behavior and also VR has been intensively used to train humans behavior in different situations, such as to understand how a person will behave in an emergency. However, do humans really behave in Virtual reality as they were in real life?

Well, a scientific research from British Columbia led by Kingstone and his team has discovered an interesting fact about human behavior in the real and virtual world. Using the phenomenon of contagious yawning which already is a very known scientific phenomenon in the neuroscience field, the scientists have decided to use the phenomenon to understand if the contagious yawning happens in virtual reality as it happened in real life.

The contagious yawning is a phenomenon in which the mirror neurons immediately mimic the action of yawning when someone yawns in front of you. In previous study scientists have found that in real life if a person is in a social situation where there is among people the contagious yawning decreases because people try to hold it back since in some cultural yawns in front of others might seem disrespectful and gives the idea of being bored.

When the scientists tried the same experiment in virtual reality the result was impressive. In normal situations people in VR watching videos of yawns, they mimic the yawns in a percentage of 38%, which is in line with the rate of real life (30-60%). However, when in VR the scientists introduce a social experimentation where the users are in a virtual conference looking at other people's yawns, they behave in a different way as it was in real life. The person does not try to hold back the yawns and the rate yawns was in the same rate as it was without having a social interaction.

With this result the scientists from the experiment are concerned that people do not behave in virtual reality as in the same way they do in real life. And Thus, it might be difficult to use VR to look for human behavior results simulating as it was in real life.

However, we might remember that even though the goal of virtual reality is to simulate a realistic world, there are many technological problems associated with this new device that are still being an issue to make it as realistic as it was in real life. One of those problems are related to the sense of presence and the cybersickness. The lack of feedback in VR makes its users not match the VR world with the physical body in the real world and thus it causes a pack of symptoms known as cybersickness. Therefore, in a near future when the VR technologies will be improved and will get as realistic as it is in the real world, more studies need to be done in order to conclude whether or not the human behavior inside a virtual environment is different from where it would be in real life.

Reference:

[1] Andrew C. Gallup, Daniil Vasilyev, Nicola Anderson & Alan Kingstone. Contagious yawning in virtual reality is affected by actual, but not simulated, social presence. Nature, 2019.

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Autor: Tassia Nunes

#neuroscience #physiologyandbehavior #socialinteraction #emotionsintogamedesign