Applied psychophysiology and biofeedback
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Appl Psychophysiol Biofeedback · Sep 2005
Development of a data management tool for investigating multivariate space and free will experiences in virtual reality.
Virtual reality (VR) has become mature enough to be successfully used in clinical applications such as exposure therapy, pain distraction, and neuropsychological assessment. However, we now need to go beyond the outcome data from this research and conduct the detailed scientific investigations required to better understand what factors influence why VR works (or doesn't) in these types of clinical applications. This knowledge is required to guide the development of VR applications in the key areas of education, training, and rehabilitation and to further evolve existing VR approaches. ⋯ After a discussion of the research protocol and the types of data that were collected, we describe a novel tool that was borne from our need to more efficiently capture, manage, and explore the complex data that was generated in this research. An example of a research participant's annotated display from this data management and visualization tool is then presented. It is our view that this tool provides the capacity to better visualize and understand the complex data relationships that may arise in VR research that investigates naturalistic free will behavior and its impact on other human performance variables.