Development of decision-making paradigms for immersive VR environment

沉浸式VR环境决策范式的开发

• 批准号: 402629-2011
• 负责人: Fecteau, Shirley
• 金额: $ 2.11万
• 依托单位: Université Laval
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2015-01-01 至 2016-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=573341
• 关键词: Development; decision; making; paradigms; immersive

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.

我们在日常生活中不断地做出决定：我该吃什么？我应该如何投资我的钱？等。决策能力可以对我们的生活产生巨大影响，如果受到损害，可能会对健康和福祉造成有害后果。尽管这些都是人类行为和行动的基础，但我们对人类大脑如何做出这些生活方式的选择知之甚少。其中一个原因是，这些技能必须在代表现实生活活动的环境中进行研究，同时在科学实验室控制的环境中进行研究。由于最近虚拟现实（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。该计划将利用这些沉浸式虚拟现实技术的进步，并将其与非侵入性脑刺激和脑成像相结合。