Stronger reactivity to social gaze in virtual reality compared to a classical laboratory environment.

reactive virtual agents social attention social gaze virtual reality

Journal

British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953)
ISSN: 2044-8295
Titre abrégé: Br J Psychol
Pays: England
ID NLM: 0373124

Informations de publication

Date de publication:
Feb 2021
Historique:
received: 04 04 2019
revised: 05 05 2020
pubmed: 3 6 2020
medline: 28 4 2021
entrez: 3 6 2020
Statut: ppublish

Résumé

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.

Identifiants

pubmed: 32484935
doi: 10.1111/bjop.12453
doi:

Types de publication

Journal Article

Langues

eng

Sous-ensembles de citation

IM

Pagination

301-314

Subventions

Organisme : European Research Council
ID : 336305
Pays : International

Informations de copyright

© 2020 The Authors. British Journal of Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Psychological Society.

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Auteurs

Marius Rubo (M)

Department of Psychology, Freiburg University, Switzerland.
Department of Psychology, Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg, Germany.

Matthias Gamer (M)

Department of Psychology, Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg, Germany.

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