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A Virtual Reality-Based Setting to Investigate How Environments and Emotionally-Laden Stimuli Interact and Compete for Accessing Consciousness

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MEDICON’23 and CMBEBIH’23 (MEDICON 2023, CMBEBIH 2023)

Part of the book series: IFMBE Proceedings ((IFMBE,volume 93))

Abstract

Despite the clinical relevance of the interaction between emotionally-laden stimuli and their context, little is known about it. We used virtual reality (VR) to create an experimental setting capable to measure subjective, behavioral and psychophysiological correlates of the conscious access – and subsequent recognition – of phobic (spiders), generically-fearful (scorpions) and neutral (ants) stimuli located in positive, neutral and negative versions of the same virtual scenario. Behavioral data showed significant effects of scenario’s salience on recognition times, among low-spider fearful participants only. In addition, error rates were significantly higher as stimulus’ pleasantness increased, resulting in the lowest number of errors for spiders and in the highest for ants (scorpions placing in the middle of this ranking, coherently with their fearful but non phobic effect) in both high- and low-spiderfearful groups. Finally, stimulus’ content was found to significantly interact with error’s rate and level of fear for spiders, suggesting that a higher self-reported fear for a stimulus increases the likelihood of detecting it. Concluding, these results showed that valence of stimuli was more impactful than that of scenario; however, scenario’s salience (but not valence) was still capable to affect recognition times and error’s rates, though among low-spiderfearful participants only.

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Acknowledgements

This research has received partial funding from European Union Horizon 2020 Programme under grant agreement n 824153 of the project ‘POTION-Promoting Social Interaction through Emotional Body Odours’.

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Author notes

  1. A. Iannizzotto and S. Frumento have contributed equally to this work and share first authorship.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Center “E.Piaggio”, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    A. Iannizzotto

  2. Department of Experimental and Clinical Medicine, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    A. Iannizzotto

  3. Department of Surgical, Medical, Molecular and Critical Area Pathology, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    S. Frumento, D. Menicucci & A. Gemignani

  4. Department of Information Engineering, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    A. L. Callara, E. P. Scilingo & A. Greco

  5. Institute of Clinical Physiology, National Research Council, Pisa, Italy

    A. Gemignani

  6. Dipartimento di Specialità cliniche, Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    A. Gemignani

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  1. A. Iannizzotto
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  2. S. Frumento
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  3. D. Menicucci
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  4. A. L. Callara
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  5. A. Gemignani
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  6. E. P. Scilingo
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  7. A. Greco
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to A. Greco .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Verlab Research Institute for Biomedical Engineering, Medical Devices, and Artificial Intelligence, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

    Almir Badnjević

  2. Verlab Research Institute for Biomedical Engineering, Medical Devices, and Artificial Intelligence, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

    Lejla Gurbeta Pokvić

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Iannizzotto, A. et al. (2024). A Virtual Reality-Based Setting to Investigate How Environments and Emotionally-Laden Stimuli Interact and Compete for Accessing Consciousness. In: Badnjević, A., Gurbeta Pokvić, L. (eds) MEDICON’23 and CMBEBIH’23. MEDICON CMBEBIH 2023 2023. IFMBE Proceedings, vol 93. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49062-0_81

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49062-0_81

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-49061-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-49062-0

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