Understanding the physiological and affective correlates of social information processing using immersive technology

社会技能和互动构成了人类意识的基础，是适应性和日常功能的支柱。它们支配着人类的许多思想和活动，并通过研究人们如何编码、存储、检索、处理和应用从社会互动中获得的信息来衡量。社会互动的基础是在发展的早期阶段奠定的，6-18岁是一个特别丰富的时期，因为青少年越来越多地在学校环境中寻求与同龄人的关系，并且随着青少年获得更大的社会独立性。尽管这一时期很重要，但我们还不清楚到底是什么因素促成了高质量的社会功能。很可能是一系列心理、注意力、情感、身体和生物方面支持这些功能。如今，科技的最新发展为我们提供了衡量这些因素的机会，并确定它们在发展过程中如何结合起来预测社会能力。******提出的研究计划借鉴了许多技术的优点，这些技术允许个人沉浸在虚拟社会环境中，以提高我们对儿童和青少年社会功能的理解。计划进行六项研究，以精确测量和识别现实日常情况下的社会推理和决策。这些研究将使用眼动追踪（一种测量视觉注意力和目光的方法）、心理生理学（测量生物觉醒，如心率）、虚拟现实（一种在实验室环境中呈现三维环境的技术）、智能视频游戏（具有教育和学习目的的互动视频游戏）、数据挖掘（允许我们自动计算一个人的社会推理质量的算法）可以绘制出人类社会信息处理的完整图景。******总的来说，拟议的研究将通过使用新的和创新的方法来衡量社会互动及其情感和生理表现，为青少年社会技能的基础知识做出贡献。使用基于最先进技术的多种方法有可能提供新的青年社会能力生物学标记。随着世界范围内对沉浸式和交互式技术独特功能的热情日益高涨，这是一个促进我们对社会功能基本基础理解的关键时刻。

Social skills and interactions form the bases of human consciousness and are a pillar of adaptive, daily functioning. They dictate much of human thought and activity and are measured by studying of how people encode, store, retrieve, process, and apply information garnered from social interactions. The foundation of social interactions is laid during the early years of development, with the 6-18 year span constituting a particularly rich period as youth increasingly seek out relationships with their peers in the school environment and as adolescents gain greater social independence. Despite the importance of this period, we do not yet understand exactly what factors contribute to high quality social functions. It is likely that a range of mental, attention, emotional, physical and biological aspects support these functions. Recent developments in technology now offer us the opportunity to measure these factors and determine how they combine during development to predict social competence. ******The proposed research program draws on the many advantages of techniques that allow individuals to immerse themselves into virtual social environments to improve our understanding of social functioning in children and adolescents. Six studies are planned that will precisely measure and identify social reasoning and decision making during realistic daily situations. The studies will use eye tracking (a measure of visual attention and eye gaze), psychophysiology (measures of biological arousal such as heart rate), virtual reality (a technique that presents three-dimensional environments in a laboratory setting), intelligent video games (interactive video games that have educational and learning purposes), and data mining (algorithms that allow us to automatically calculate the quality of a person's social reasoning) to draw a complete picture of human social information processing.******Together, the proposed studies will contribute to fundamental knowledge of social skills in youth by using new and innovative ways of measuring social interactions and their emotional and physiological manifestations. Using multiple methods based on state-of-the-art technology has the potential to provide new biological markers of social competence in youth. As enthusiasm for the unique capabilities of immersive and interactive technologies grows worldwide, this is a critical time to contribute to our understanding of the fundamental bases of social functions.