Using digital and immersive technologies to understand the contribution of sensory, perceptual, affective, cognitive and physiological factors to Social Information Processing

社交技能和互动构成了人类意识的基础，是适应性日常功能的支柱。它们决定了人类的大部分思想和活动，并通过研究人们如何编码，存储，检索，处理和应用从社交互动中获得的信息来衡量。社会交往的基础是在发展的最初几年奠定的，青少年时期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，但我们还不清楚究竟是什么因素促成了高质量的社会功能。很可能是一系列的知觉，心理，情感，身体和生物方面支持这些功能。技术的最新发展现在为我们提供了测量这些因素的机会，并确定它们在发展过程中如何结合联合收割机来预测社会能力。 拟议的研究计划借鉴了技术的许多优点，使个人沉浸在虚拟社交环境中，以提高我们对儿童和青少年社会功能的理解。计划进行四项研究，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（视觉注意力和眼睛凝视的测量），心理生理学（测量生物唤醒，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），和数据挖掘（允许我们自动计算一个人的社会推理质量的算法）来绘制人类社会信息处理的完整画面。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，从而有助于对青年社会技能的基本了解。使用基于最先进技术的多种方法有可能为青年的社会能力提供新的生物标志物。随着对沉浸式和交互式技术独特功能的热情在全球范围内不断增长，这是一个关键时刻，有助于我们理解社会功能的基本基础。

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 period of adolescence constituting a particularly rich period as teenagers increasingly seek out relationships with their peers in the school environment and 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 perceptual, mental, 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. Four 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.