Development of decision-making paradigms for immersive VR environment

我们在日常生活中不断地做出决定：我应该吃什么？我应该如何投资我的钱？等。决策技能可能会对我们的生活产生重大影响，如果受到损害，可能会对健康和幸福造成有害的后果。虽然这些都是人类行为和行动的基础，但人们对人脑如何做出这些生活方式选择知之甚少。其中一个原因是，这些技能必须在代表现实生活活动的背景下学习，但必须在实验室控制的科学环境中学习。多亏了最近的虚拟现实(VR)技术的进步，我们终于可以在这些环境中研究生活方式的决策。拟议的计划将使用这些身临其境的VR技术进步，并将它们与非侵入性脑刺激和脑成像相结合。 该项目的目标是开发一个模拟日常生活情景的原创实验平台，以表征人类生活方式决策的认知和大脑过程。为此，我们将利用VR环境和VR人来创建和验证各种沉浸式VR范例。三组人类受试者将在这些范式上进行测试：健康成年人、肥胖成年人和病态赌博成年人。当他们在VR环境中执行决策任务时，我们将描述他们的行为特征，并通过经颅直流电刺激和脑电检查研究他们与特定行为相关的大脑活动。 总之，这项工作旨在创造一种新的科学方法来研究生活方式决策的机制。了解决策技能的重要性支持了拟议工作的重要性。考虑理解为什么一名肥胖(或糖尿病)成年人决定遵守医学建议(例如，健康饮食、运动)，而另一名成年人却不遵守，即使他/她的生命受到威胁，这会产生什么影响。这些关键的生活方式选择对我们每个人来说都是终身相关的。

We are continuously making decision in our daily life: What should I eat? How should I invest my money? Etc. Decision-making skills can have great impact on our life and, if impaired, can lead to deleterious consequences on health and well-fare. Although these are fundamental to human behaviors and actions, little is known on how the human brain makes these lifestyle choices. One reason for this is that these skills must be studied in contexts representative of real life activities, yet within scientific laboratory-controlled settings. Thanks to recent virtual reality (VR) technological advances, we can finally study lifestyle decision-making in these settings. The proposed program will use these immersive VR technological advances and combine them with noninvasive brain stimulation and brain imaging. The objective of this program is to develop an original experimental platform mimicking daily life situations to characterize the cognitive and brain processes of lifestyle decision-making in humans. In order to do so, we will create and validate various immersive VR paradigms with VR environment and VR human. Three groups of human subjects will be tested on these paradigms: healthy adults, adults with obesity, and adults with pathological gambling. We will characterize their behaviors while they will perform decision-making tasks in the VR setting and study their brain activity associated with specific behaviors with transcranial direct current stimulation and electroencephalography. In sum, this work aims at creating a new scientific approach to study mechanisms of lifestyle decision-making. Significance of the proposed work is supported by the importance of understanding decision-making skills. Consider the impact of understanding why one adult with obesity (or diabetes) decides to comply with medical recommendations (e.g., healthy diet, exercise), whereas another does not comply even though his/her life is at stake. And these critical lifestyle choices carry life-long relevance in each of us.