Seeing in Slow Motion: Manipulating Arousal in Virtual Reality

Abstract

The only evidence that seeing in slow-motion exists comes from retrospective interviews. An ongoing debate is whether this phenomenon exists as a figment of memory or a true function of visual perception. Testing these speculations is difficult given slow-motion experience is often associated with intense, stressful, and even threatening situations that dramatically heighten arousal. Virtual reality systems might provide an opportunity to study the experience online, thus offering insights into the speculated mechanisms. This study explores the feasibility to induce heightened arousal and its possible implications on perceptual encoding of information. Participants were exposed to various situations designed to influence arousal as measured by heart rate, and an implicit memory task was used for each situation to test perceptual processing. This study did not reveal performance gains associated with increased physiological arousal.

A Mini Review of Presence and Immersion in Virtual Reality

“…Recently, Wilkinson et al (2019) conducted a study to explore subjective experience of slow-motion using VR which consisted of various height-related events (three events for arousal manipulations: walking on a sidewalk, plank-walking from 100m height, falling from the plank from top of a building) coupled with a perceptual encoding task. Heart rate was used as an objective measure of arousal.…”

“…Many studies examining presence and immersion in VR generally compare this [VR] technology to another medium or the real world. Although some research suggests the effectiveness of VR-HMDs in supporting participants' feelings of being in the world just like in the physical one, Wilkinson et al (2019) discovered that there may be a ceiling effect that certain scenarios may not lead to optimal presence (i.e., the experience of falling was not realistic enough to make participants believe they were actually falling).…”