Virtual Reality For Neuropsychology And Affective Cognitive Sciences Theoretical And Methodological Avenues For Studying Human Cognition

Title Page -- Foreword -- Contributors -- Contents -- Part I. Virtual Reality for Health Care -- Virtual Reality for Health Care: a survey -- Human Factors Consideration in Clinical Applications of Virtual Reality -- Part II. Virtual Reality for Psychological Assessment and Rehabilitation -- Virtual Reality Therapy: An Effective Treatment for Psychological Disorders -- Virtual Reality as Assessment Tool in Psychology -- Virtual Reality for the Treatment of Autism -- Virtual Reality for the Palliative Care of Cancer -- Virtual Reality for the Treatment of Body Image Disturbances -- Development of a Virtual Sand Box: An Application of Virtual Environment for Psychological Treatment -- Part III. Virtual Reality for Neuro-Physiological Assessment and Rehabilitation -- Virtual Reality and Cognitive Assessment and Rehabilitation: The State of the Art -- Virtual Environments in Neuropsychological Assessment and Rehabilitation -- Virtual Environments for the Rehabilitation of Disorders of Attention and Movement -- Virtual Reality in the Assessment of Neuromotor Diseases: Measurement of Time Response in Real and Virtual Environments -- Virtual Reality Therapy of Multiple Sclerosis and Spinal Cord Injury: Design Considerations for a Haptic-Visual Interface -- Author Index

This book proposes a framework for integrating neuroscience and cyberpsychology for the study of social, cognitive, and affective processes.

Immersive technology as an umbrella concept consists of multiple emerging technologies including augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), gaming, simulation, and 3D printing. Research has shown immersive technology provides unique learning opportunities for experiential learning, multiple perspectives, and knowledge transfer. Due to its role in influencing learners’ cognitive and affective processes, it is shown to have great potential in changing the educational landscape in the decades to come. However, there is a lack of general cognitive and affective theoretical framework to guide the diverse aspects of immersive technology research. In fact, lacking the cognitive and affective theoretical framework has begun to hamper the design and application of immersive technology in schools and related professional training. Cognitive and Affective Perspectives on Immersive Technology in Education is an essential research book that explores methods and implications for the design and implementation of upcoming immersive technologies in pedagogical and professional development settings. The book includes case studies that highlight the cognitive and affective processes in immersive technology as well as the successful applications of immersive technology in education. Featuring a wide range of topics such as curriculum design, K-12 education, and mobile learning, this book is ideal for academicians, educators, policymakers, curriculum developers, instructional designers, administrators, researchers, and students.

Virtual Reality (VR) is a rapidly maturing technology that offers new and unique solutions to otherwise intractable problems in the study of cognition, behavior and neuroscience. VR removes many of the constraints imposed by laboratory paradigms, allowing us to track cognitive, behavioral and brain responses to naturalistic (or even impossible) situations without sacrificing experimental control. But VR is not a tool that can be swiftly and effortlessly integrated into existing research pipelines; currently, the benefits of VR are accompanied by a host of methodological challenges and important practical considerations. To help navigate this new methodology, this volume provides a balanced review of both the exciting new findings emerging from VR labs and the challenges and limitations that are part and parcel of VR research. This volume is an important first step toward establishing a standardised methodology for conducting research in VR. To this end, the volume provides a wealth of practical advice for researchers who are new to the technology. This volume is authored by an interdisciplinary team of VR researchers including computer scientists, engineers, psychologists and neuroscientists. It highlights current research in the field to demonstrate how VR advances our understanding of the mind, while also providing groundbreaking solutions in applied domains.

Western contemporary dance and body-mind education have engaged in a pas de deux for more than four decades. The rich interchange of somatics and dance has altered both fields, but scholarship that substantiates these ideas through the findings of twentieth-century scientific advances has been missing. This book fills that gap and brings to light contemporary discoveries of neuroscience and somatic education as they relate to dance. Drawing from the burgeoning field of “embodiment”—itself an idea at the intersection of the sciences, humanities, arts, and technologies—Body and Mind in Motion highlights the relevance of somatic education within dance education, dance science, and body-mind studies.

"This book applies the principles of research in the study of human cognition to games, with chapters representing 15 different disciplines in the learning sciences (psychology, serious game design, educational technology, applied linguistics, instructional design, eLearning, computer engineering, educational psychology, cognitive science, digital media, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, computer science, anthropology, education)"--Provided by publisher.

Advances in modern sciences occur thanks to within-fields discoveries as well as confrontation of concepts and methods from separated, sometimes distant, domains of knowledge. For instance, the fields of psychology and psychopathology benefited from accumulated contributions from cognitive neurosciences, which, in turn, received insights from molecular chemistry, cellular biology, physics (neuroimaging), statistics and computer sciences (data processing), etc. From the results of these researches, one can argue that among the numerous cognitive phenomena supposedly involved in the emergence the human intelligence and organized behavior, some of them are specific to the social nature of our phylogenetic order. Scientific reductionism allowed to divide the social cognitive system into several components, i.e. emotion processing and regulation, mental state inference (theory of mind), agency, etc. New paradigms were progressively designed to investigate these processes within highly-controlled laboratory settings. Moreover, the related constructs were successful at better understanding psychopathological conditions such as autism and schizophrenia, with partial relationships with illness outcomes. Here, we would like to outline the parallel development of concepts in social neurosciences and in other domains such as computer science, affective computing, virtual reality development, and even hardware technologies. While several researchers in neurosciences pointed out the necessity to consider naturalistic social cognition (Zaki and Ochsner, Ann N Y Acad Sci 1167, 16-30, 2009), the second person perspective (Schilbach et al., Behav Brain Sci 36(4), 393-414, 2013) and reciprocity (de Bruin et al., Front Hum Neurosci 6, 151, 2012), both computer and software developments allowed more and more realistic real-time models of our environment and of virtual humans capable of some interaction with users. As noted at the very beginning of this editorial, a new convergence between scientific disciplines might occur from which it is tricky to predict the outcomes in terms of new concepts, methods and uses. Although this convergence is motivated by the intuition that it fits well ongoing societal changes (increasing social demands on computer technologies, augmenting funding), it comes with several difficulties for which the current Frontiers in’ topic strives to bring some positive answers, and to provide both theoretical arguments and experimental examples. The first issue is about concepts and vocabulary as the contributions described in the following are authored by neuroscientists, computer scientists, psychopathologists, etc. A special attention was given during the reviewing process to stay as close as possible to the publication standards in psychological and health sciences, and to avoid purely technical descriptions. The second problem concerns methods: more complex computerized interaction models results in unpredictable and poorly controlled experiments. In other words, the assets of naturalistic paradigms may be alleviated by the difficulty to match results between subjects, populations, conditions. Of course, this practical question is extremely important for investigating pathologies that are associated with profoundly divergent behavioral patterns. Some of the contributions of this topic provide description of strategies that allowed to solve these difficulties, at least partially. The last issue is about heterogeneity of the objectives of the researches presented here. While selection criteria focused on the use of innovative technologies to assess or improve social cognition, the fields of application of this approach were quite unexpected. In an attempt to organize the contributions, three directions of research can be identified: 1) how innovation in methods might improve understanding and assessment of social cognition disorders or pathology? 2) within the framework of cognitive behavioral psychotherapies (CBT), how should we consider the use of virtual reality or augmented reality? 3) which are the benefits of these techniques for investigating severe mental disorders (schizophrenia or autism) and performing cognitive training? The first challenging question is insightfully raised in the contribution of Timmermans and Schilbach (2014) giving orientations for investigating alterations of social interaction in psychiatric disorders by the use of dual interactive eye tracking with virtual anthropomorphic avatars. Joyal, Jacob and collaborators (2014) bring concurrent and construct validities of a newly developed set of virtual faces expressing six fundamental emotions. The relevance of virtual reality was exemplified with two contributions focusing on anxiety related phenomena. Jackson et al. (2015) describe a new environment allowing to investigate empathy for dynamic FACS-coded facial expressions including pain. Based on a systematic investigation of the impact of social stimuli modalities (visual, auditory), Ruch and collaborators are able to characterize the specificity of the interpretation of laughter in people with gelotophobia (2014). On the issue of social anxiety, Aymerich-Franch et al. (2014) presented two studies in which public speaking anxiety has been correlated with avatars’ similarity of participants’ self-representations. The second issue focuses on how advances in virtual reality may benefit to cognitive and behavioral therapies in psychiatry. These interventions share a common framework that articulates thoughts, feelings or emotions and behaviors and proposes gradual modification of each of these levels thanks to thought and schema analysis, stress reduction procedures, etc. They were observed to be somehow useful for the treatment of depression, stress disorders, phobias, and are gaining some authority in personality disorders and addictions. The main asset of new technologies is the possibility to control the characteristics of symptom-eliciting stimuli/situations, and more precisely the degree to which immersion is enforced. For example, Baus and Bouchard (2014) provide a review on the extension of virtual reality exposure-based therapy toward recently described augmented reality exposure-based therapy in individuals with phobias. Concerning substance dependence disorders, Hone-Blanchet et collaborators (2014) present another review on how virtual reality can be an asset for both therapy and craving assessment stressing out the possibilities to simulate social interactions associated with drug seeking behaviors and even peers’ pressure to consume. The last issue this Frontiers’ topic deals with encompasses the questions raised by social cognitive training or remediation in severe and chronic mental disorders (autistic disorders, schizophrenia). Here, therapies are based on drill and practice or strategy shaping procedures, and, most of the time, share an errorless learning of repeated cognitive challenges. Computerized methods were early proposed for that they do, effortlessly and with limited costs, repetitive stimulations. While, repetition was incompatible with realism in the social cognitive domain, recent advances provide both immersion and full control over stimuli. Georgescu and al. (2014) exhaustively reviews the use of virtual characters to assess and train non-verbal communication in high-functioning autism (HFA). Grynszpan and Nadel (2015) present an original eye-tracking method to reveal the link between gaze patterns and pragmatic abilities again in HFA. About schizophrenia, Oker and collaborators (2015) discuss and report some insights on how an affective and reactive virtual agents might be useful to assess and remediate several defects of social cognitive disorders. About assessment within virtual avatars on schizophrenia, Park et al., (2014) focused on effect of perceived intimacy on social decision making with schizophrenia patients. Regarding schizophrenia remediation, Peyroux and Franck (2014) presented a new method named RC2S which is a cognitive remediation program to improve social cognition in schizophrenia and related disorders. To conclude briefly, while it is largely acknowledged that social interaction can be studied as a topic of its own, all the contributions demonstrate the added value of expressive virtual agents and affective computing techniques for the experimentation. It also appears that the use of virtual reality is at the very beginning of a new scientific endeavor in cognitive sciences and medicine.