Walking down memory lane: a virtual reality approach to support the study of the mnemonic tuning for contamination

• Autor(a) principal: Silva, Diana Rafaela Gomes
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/36999
• topic: Virtual reality; 360º videos; Behavioral immune system; Memory; Experimental psychology

Biologically, humans have evolved to adapt against pathogens but, since fighting them can have negative implication to the body, a set of mechanisms have evolved towards avoiding contamination, called the Behavioral Immune System (BIS). To better understand the BIS, Experimental Psychology studies its impact by conducting experiments where a participant is exposed to several objects some of which are presented as having been in contact with a source of contamination (e.g., a sick person).To ensure the safety of the participants, these experiments typically rely on photographs of the objects and individuals and on background stories establishing the connection between both, which requires some imagination effort, from the participant, and affects the realism of the experiment. To move the research on BIS and memory into a potentially more ecologically-valid setting, the current work proposes a Virtual Reality (VR) based approach where 360º videos are used as stimuli, during the experiments. To this end, a set of tools were devised to support creating and cataloging videos, and to configure and control their presentation to the participant, in the virtual environment. At an early stage, a partial version of the platform served as grounds for a pilot study aiming to assess the overall adequateness of the proposal and validate acquisition parameters for the stimuli. The positive outcomes of this study informed the development of the complete Experiment Support System and, at its current stage, results from an evaluation with ten users show a good level of usability. Considering that the proposed system already supports the implementation of the designed experimental protocol, it establishes a promising ground for further evolving the research regarding the Mnemonic Tuning for Contamination.