Why Is Virtual Reality Interesting for Philosophers?

Virtual reality interventions and their effects on the cognition of individuals with Alzheimer's disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND

Dementia due to Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most prevalent neurocognitive disorder in the world and impacts the individual's cognitive functions and functionality in the early stages of the condition. Virtual reality (VR) interventions can assist in non-pharmacological treatment in a more ecological way, positively impacting cognitive abilities. However, there are few studies on VR exclusively involving people with AD in randomized controlled trials.

OBJECTIVE

To evaluate the effects of VR intervention on the cognitive functions of people with AD.

METHODS

A systematically conducted search was carried out in MEDLINE, EMBASE, BVS, Web of Science, and Scopus. Eligible studies were randomized controlled trials comparing the efficacy of VR and traditional cognitive interventions in people with AD. Methodologic quality was assessed with the Cochrane risk of bias tool, and outcomes were calculated as risk ratios (for dichotomous outcomes) and mean differences (for continuous outcomes) with 95% confidence interval.

RESULTS

A total of three randomized controlled trials with 75 participants were included. An improvement in the performance of the VR group was observed in memory, especially when comparing the usual treatment [MD = 0.99; CI95%: 0.33; 1.66; I2 = 0%]. VR has little or no effect on participants' executive function [MD = 1.36; 95%CI: -1.12; 3.85; I2 = 0%] compared to the usual treatment.

CONCLUSIONS

Our study results cautiously suggest, despite the small number of participants, that VR intervention may be a suitable memory treatment for individuals diagnosed with AD.

Embodiment and agency in a digital world

We are agents and our agency is often best characterized in terms of embodied cognition. However, this is not to deny that there are cognitively significant ways of agentive engagement with the world that may be described without referring to our embodiment. In this paper we shall focus on the interplay between embodied agency and non-embodied agency or agency that may not be straightforwardly described in terms of embodied cognition in the context of interaction with digital technologies. In recent years a lot of our daily lives are coupled to the world via digital technologies. Yet how to understand the nature and evolution of our agency in the context of interacting with daily digital technologies is an open question. We propose to address this question by focusing on whether the steady development of digital technologies in our daily lives challenges the view that embodied agency is the de facto way of robustly engaging with the world and if embodied cognition is challenged then what is taking its place in scenarios where it was once dominant.

A virtual reality paradigm simulating blood donation serves as a platform to test interventions to promote donation

Effective interventions that support blood donor retention are needed. Yet, integrating an intervention into the time-pressed and operationally sensitive context of a blood donation center requires justification for disruptions to an optimized process. This research provides evidence that virtual reality (VR) paradigms can serve as a research environment in which interventions can be tested prior to being delivered in blood donation centers. Study 1 (N = 48) demonstrated that 360°-video VR blood donation environments elicit a similar profile of emotional experience to a live donor center. Presence and immersion were high, and cybersickness symptoms low. Study 2 (N = 134) was an experiment deploying the 360°-video VR environments to test the impact of an intervention on emotional experience and intentions to donate. Participants in the intervention condition who engaged in a suite of tasks drawn from the process model of emotion regulation (including attentional deployment, positive reappraisal, and response modulation) reported more positive emotion than participants in a control condition, which in turn increased intentions to donate blood. By showing the promise for benefitting donor experience via a relatively low-cost and low-resource methodology, this research supports the use of VR paradigms to trial interventions prior to deployment in operationally-context field settings.

Virtual reality in the diagnostic and therapy for mental disorders: A systematic review

BACKGROUND

Virtual reality (VR) technologies are playing an increasingly important role in the diagnostics and treatment of mental disorders.

OBJECTIVE

To systematically review the current evidence regarding the use of VR in the diagnostics and treatment of mental disorders.

DATA SOURCE

Systematic literature searches via PubMed (last literature update: 9^th of May 2022) were conducted for the following areas of psychopathology: Specific phobias, panic disorder and agoraphobia, social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders, dementia disorders, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, depression, autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia spectrum disorders, and addiction disorders.

ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA

To be eligible, studies had to be published in English, to be peer-reviewed, to report original research data, to be VR-related, and to deal with one of the above-mentioned areas of psychopathology.

STUDY EVALUATION

For each study included, various study characteristics (including interventions and conditions, comparators, major outcomes and study designs) were retrieved and a risk of bias score was calculated based on predefined study quality criteria.

RESULTS

Across all areas of psychopathology, k = 9315 studies were inspected, of which k = 721 studies met the eligibility criteria. From these studies, 43.97% were considered assessment-related, 55.48% therapy-related, and 0.55% were mixed. The highest research activity was found for VR exposure therapy in anxiety disorders, PTSD and addiction disorders, where the most convincing evidence was found, as well as for cognitive trainings in dementia and social skill trainings in autism spectrum disorder.

CONCLUSION

While VR exposure therapy will likely find its way successively into regular patient care, there are also many other promising approaches, but most are not yet mature enough for clinical application.

REVIEW REGISTRATION

PROSPERO register CRD42020188436.

FUNDING

The review was funded by budgets from the University of Bonn. No third party funding was involved.

AR-AI Tools as a Response to High Employee Turnover and Shortages in Manufacturing during Regular, Pandemic, and War Times

The world faces the continuously increasing issue of a lack of skilled employees, staff migration, and turnover. It is strengthened by unexpected situations such as wars, pandemics, and other civilization crises. Solutions are sought and researched in various branches of industry and academia, including engineering, social sciences, management, and political and computer sciences. From the viewpoint of this paper, this is a side topic of Industry 4.0 and, more specifically, sustainability in working environments, and the issue is related to production employees who perform manual operations. Some of the tasks cannot be carried out under robotization or automation; therefore, novel human-work support tools are expected. This paper presents such highly demanded support tools related to augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI). First, a panoramic literature review is given. Secondly, the authors explain the main objective of the presented contribution. Then the authors’ achievements are described—the R&D focus on such solutions and the introduction of the developed tools that are based on AR and AI. Benefits connected to the AR-AI technology applications are presented in terms of both time savings with the tool usage and job simplification, enabling inexperienced, unskilled, or less skilled employees to perform the work in the selected manual production processes.

Consumer Consciousness in Multisensory Extended Reality

The reality-virtuality continuum encompasses a multitude of objects, events and environments ranging from real-world multisensory inputs to interactive multisensory virtual simulators, in which sensory integration can involve very different combinations of both physical and digital inputs. These different ways of stimulating the senses can affect the consumer's consciousness, potentially altering their judgements and behaviours. In this perspective paper, we explore how technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) can, by generating and modifying the human sensorium, act on consumer consciousness. We discuss the potential impact of this altered consciousness for consumer behaviour while, at the same time, considering how it may pave the way for further research.

Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘On Raised Beach’: ‘Geopoetics’ in a Time of Catastrophic Crisis’

The poet Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978) was the major driving force behind the twentieth-century Scottish literary renaissance and was also a passionate Scottish nationalist. His poem ‘On a Raised Beach’ (1934) has been understood in theological and philosophical terms as a metaphysical exploration, albeit one grounded in an immediate experience of nature that took place on Shetland. In this paper, MacDiarmid’s epic is placed in the context of the present environmental crisis and the ongoing consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. ‘On a Raised Beach’ can now be re-located within the hermeneutical tradition of ‘Geopoetics’, a Scottish genre that is articulated and asserted by the poet Kenneth White (1938–). Whilst, however, White draws upon the highly contested and polyvalent concept of ‘shamanism’ in elaborating his standpoint, we shall argue that it is also appropriate to look for affinities between this dynamic poem and the ethos and mysticism of ‘deep ecology’, a perspective that invokes the equally contested mythology of ‘Gaia’.

IMVEST, an immersive multimodal virtual environment stress test for humans that adjusts challenge to individual's performance

Laboratory stressors are essential tools to study the human stress response. However, despite considerable progress in the development of stress induction procedures in recent years, the field is still missing standardization and the methods employed frequently require considerable personnel resources. Virtual reality (VR) offers flexible solutions to these problems, but available VR stress-induction tests still contain important sources of variation that challenge data interpretation. One of the major drawbacks is that tasks based on motivated performance do not adapt to individual abilities. Here, we provide open access to, and present, a novel and standardized immersive multimodal virtual environment stress test (IMVEST) in which participants are simultaneously exposed to mental -arithmetic calculations- and environmental challenges, along with intense visual and auditory stimulation. It contains critical elements of stress elicitation – perceived threat to physical self, social-evaluative threat and negative feedback, uncontrollability and unpredictability – and adjusts mathematical challenge to individual's ongoing performance. It is accompanied by a control VR scenario offering a comparable but not stressful situation. We validate and characterize the stress response to IMVEST in one-hundred-and-eighteen participants. Both cortisol and a wide range of autonomic nervous system (ANS) markers – extracted from the electrocardiogram, electrodermal activity and respiration – are significantly affected. We also show that ANS features can be used to train a stress prediction machine learning model that strongly discriminates between stress and control conditions, and indicates which aspects of IMVEST affect specific ANS components.

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Laboratory stressors are an essential tool to study the stress response in humans.

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We present a novel immersive multimodal virtual environment stress test (IMVEST).

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IMVEST adapts to individual performance.

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Induces acute increase in stress markers.

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Stress responses do not depend on performance differences.

A Methodological Framework for Assessing Social Presence in Music Interactions in Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) brings radical new possibilities to the empirical study of social music cognition and interaction. In the present article, we consider the role of VR as a research tool, based on its potential to create a sense of "social presence": the illusory feeling of being, and socially interacting, inside a virtual environment. This makes VR promising for bridging ecological validity ("research in the wild") and experimental control ("research in the lab") in empirical music research. A critical assumption however is the actual ability of VR to simulate real-life social interactions, either via human-embodied avatars or computer-controlled agents. The mediation of social musical interactions via VR is particularly challenging due to their embodied, complex, and emotionally delicate nature. In this article, we introduce a methodological framework to operationalize social presence by a combination of factors across interrelated layers, relating to the performance output, embodied co-regulation, and subjective experiences. This framework provides the basis for the proposal of a pragmatic approach to determine the level of social presence in virtual musical interactions, by comparing the outcomes across the multiple layers with the outcomes of corresponding real-life musical interactions. We applied and tested this pragmatic approach via a case-study of piano duet performances of the piece Piano Phase composed by Steve Reich. This case-study indicated that a piano duet performed in VR, in which the real-time interaction between pianists is mediated by embodied avatars, might lead to a strong feeling of social presence, as reflected in the measures of performance output, embodied co-regulation, and subjective experience. In contrast, although a piano duet in VR between an actual pianist and a computer-controlled agent led to a relatively successful performance output, it was inadequate in terms of both embodied co-regulation and subjective experience.

Deep and Meaningful E-Learning with Social Virtual Reality Environments in Higher Education: A Systematic Literature Review

Deep and meaningful learning (DML) in distant education should be an essential outcome of quality education. In this literature review, we focus on e-learning effectiveness along with the factors and conditions leading to DML when using social virtual reality environments (SVREs) in distance mode higher education (HE). Hence, a systematic literature review was conducted summarizing the findings from thirty-three empirical studies in HE between 2004 (appearance of VR) and 2019 (before coronavirus appearance). We searched for the cognitive, social, and affective aspects of DML in a research framework and studied their weight in SVREs. The findings suggest that the use of SVREs can provide authentic, simulated, cognitively challenging experiences in engaging, motivating environments for open-ended social and collaborative interactions and intentional, personalized learning. Furthermore, the findings indicate that educators and SVRE designers need to place more emphasis on the socio-cultural semiotics and emotional aspects of e-learning and ethical issues such as privacy and security. The mediating factors for DML in SVREs were accumulated and classified in the resultant Blended Model for Deep and Meaningful e-learning in SVREs. Improvement recommendations include meaningful contexts, purposeful activation, learner agency, intrinsic emotional engagement, holistic social integration, and meticulous user obstacle removal.

The Use of Virtual Reality Alone Does Not Promote Training Performance (but Sense of Presence Does)

Virtual reality (VR) offers novel ways to develop skills and learning. This technology can be used to enhance the way we educate and train professionals by possibly being more effective, cost-efficient, and reducing training-related risks. However, the potential benefits from virtual training assume that the trained skills can be transferred to the real world. Nevertheless, in the current published scientific literature, there is limited empirical evidence that links VR use to better learning. The present investigation aimed to explore the use of VR as a tool for training procedural skills and compare this modality with traditional instruction methods. To investigate skill development using the two forms of training, participants were randomly divided into two groups. The first group received training through an instructional video, while the second group trained in VR. After the training session, the participants performed the trained task in a real setting, and task performance was measured. Subsequently, the user's experienced sense of presence and simulator sickness (SS) was measured with self-report questionnaires. There were no significant differences between groups for any of the performance measures. There was no gender effect on performance. Importantly, the results of the present study indicate that a high sense of presence during the VR simulation might contribute to increased skill learning. These findings can be used as a starting point that could be of value when further exploring VR as a tool for skill development.

Origin and evolution of human consciousness

The study of the origin and evolution of consciousness presents several problems. The first problem concerns terminology. The word consciousness comes from the Latin term conscĭentĭa that means "knowledge shared with others." However, the term consciousness also refers to several other aspects involving both its levels (sleep, coma, dreams and waking state) and contents (subjective, phenomenal and objective). A second issue is the problem of other minds, namely, the possibility to establish whether others have minds very like our own. Moreover, human consciousness has been linked to three different forms of memory: procedural/implicit, semantic and episodic. All these different aspects of consciousness will be discussed in the first part of the chapter. In the second part, we discuss different neuroscientific theories on consciousness and examine how research from developmental psychology, clinical neurology (epilepsy, coma, vegetative state and minimal state of consciousness), neuropsychology (blindsight, agnosia, neglect, split-brain and ocular rivalry), and comparative neuropsychophysiology contribute to the study of consciousness. Finally, in the last part of the chapter we discuss the distinctive features of human consciousness and in particular the ability to travel mentally through time, the phenomenon of joint intentionality, theory of mind and language.