Speaker: Dr Paul Warren, University of Manchester
Abstract
For much of the last two decades I have asked participants (with the head stabilised on a chin rest) to make behavioural responses to simple visual stimuli, so that I might test hypotheses about human perceptual and cognitive processing.
In spite of a vague interest in the potential for VR technology to improve such work,
I had only once tried to use it in a research context, concluding that it was massively inadequate for my needs.
This changed about 6 years ago when I first tried the HTC Vive and subsequently the Occulus (Meta) Rift and Quest head mounted displays.
Since then I have built the Virtual Reality Research (VR2) facility at the University of Manchester and I am now conducting a wide range of VR-based experiments that probe aspects of perception and action as well as judgement and decision making.
In this talk I will summarise a number of such studies. Along the way we will consider questions such as:
- How do we ever manage to perceive a stable environment and what sensory information does this rest upon?
- Why might some clinical populations fail to perceive a stable world?
- What are the functional consequences of different types of sensory disfunction?
- How can we use what we know about human perception and action to improve VR technology?
- What can we learn about cognitive biases using VR?
My aim is to convince you (and possibly to a lesser extent me) that not only does VR technology have an important role to play in the study of perception, cognition and psychology more generally, but also that it is one of the most promising tools we have available.
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