Processing Racial Stereotypes in Virtual Reality: An Exploratory Study Using Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS)

Kim, Gyoung; Buntain, Noah; Hirshfield, Leanne M.; Costa, Mark R.; Chock, T. Makana

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-22419-6_29

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 22 publications

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“…On the other hand, functional nearinfrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) offers a recording of cortical activity in a natural mobility setting with higher spatial resolution than EEG, less susceptibility to motion artifacts and electrical noises, portability, and lightweight characteristic. These advantages substantiate the great potential for the combination of VR-HMD and fNIRS, which has been recently demonstrated in a bisection task (Seraglia et al, 2011), the assessment of prospective memory (Dong et al, 2017;Dong et al, 2018), the processing of racial stereotypes (Kim et al, 2019), performance monitoring during training (Hudak et al, 2017), and a neurofeedback system to support attention (Aksoy et al, 2019). However, the feasibility and ecological validity of using fNIRS to measure fear response during virtual fear exposure is still unexplored.…”

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confidence: 70%

Detecting Fear of Heights Response to a Virtual Reality Environment Using Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

With

Thammasan

Poel

2022

Front. Comput. Sci.

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To enable virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) that treats anxiety disorders by gradually exposing the patient to fear using virtual reality (VR), it is important to monitor the patient's fear levels during the exposure. Despite the evidence of a fear circuit in the brain as reflected by functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), the measurement of fear response in highly immersive VR using fNIRS is limited, especially in combination with a head-mounted display (HMD). In particular, it is unclear to what extent fNIRS can differentiate users with and without anxiety disorders and detect fear response in a highly ecological setting using an HMD. In this study, we investigated fNIRS signals captured from participants with and without a fear of height response. To examine the extent to which fNIRS signals of both groups differ, we conducted an experiment during which participants with moderate fear of heights and participants without it were exposed to VR scenarios involving heights and no heights. The between-group statistical analysis shows that the fNIRS data of the control group and the experimental group are significantly different only in the channel located close to right frontotemporal lobe, where the grand average oxygenated hemoglobin Δ[HbO] contrast signal of the experimental group exceeds that of the control group. The within-group statistical analysis shows significant differences between the grand average Δ[HbO] contrast values during fear responses and those during no-fear responses, where the Δ[HbO] contrast values of the fear responses were significantly higher than those of the no-fear responses in the channels located towards the frontal part of the prefrontal cortex. Also, the channel located close to frontocentral lobe was found to show significant difference for the grand average deoxygenated hemoglobin contrast signals. Support vector machine-based classifier could detect fear responses at an accuracy up to 70% and 74% in subject-dependent and subject-independent classifications, respectively. The results demonstrate that cortical hemodynamic responses of a control group and an experimental group are different to a considerable extent, exhibiting the feasibility and ecological validity of the combination of VR-HMD and fNIRS to elicit and detect fear responses. This research thus paves a way toward the a brain-computer interface to effectively manipulate and control VRET.

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