The very nature of virtual reality is changing our understanding of technological progress and technology in general. A new study by researchers at the University of British Columbia suggests that not only are people's perceptions of the world changing, but also their way of thinking and behavior.
Virtual reality vs reality
By placing a small screen in front of the user's eyes, technology seems to exclude the rest of the world from sight. Scientists at the University of British Columbia have found that the physiological responses of people in virtual response and in real life are different.
"This study shows that there is a chasm between reality and the world of virtual reality," said Alan Kingston, professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and one of the leaders of the study.
How was the study
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The researchers worked with virtual reality trying to track the factors that influence a person's desire to yawn. In particular, they investigated the phenomenon of “contagious yawning”. This is the phenomenon of how a person begins to yawn reflexively when someone yawns next to him. It has been studied for a long time and is well studied, but the question was whether this phenomenon will be reproduced in virtual reality.
The researchers concluded that when people feel that they are being watched, that is, when there is a "social presence" effect, they do not yawn: they suppress the urge consciously or do not feel the urge to yawn at all. Now this experience had to be transferred to virtual reality and recorded what was happening in it. Participants wearing headphones were shown videos of people yawning. The percentage of people who started yawning after people in videos was 38%, while in real life the percentage of those who gave in to the urge to yawn ranges from 30 to 60%.
Further, the effect of "social presence" was added to virtual reality. As it turned out, it had practically no effect on the urge to yawn among the participants in the experiment: the same percentage of the group yawned even when a virtual person was watching them or when they were watched by a video camera.
A curious paradox
And here's a curious paradox: stimuli that make you yawn in real life work in virtual reality, but stimuli that suppress yawning in real life don't work in virtual reality.
The presence of a real person is more important than any event in the virtual world. Participants in the experiment could not hear or see the presence of a person, but in the case when they knew that the researcher was observing them, they deliberately suppressed the yawn. In real life, social control determined the line of behavior.
How do you feel about virtual reality?
Author: Madina Kemova
