Papers by Christopher Maymon
The presence of fear: How subjective fear, not physiological changes, shapes the experience of presence
Journal of experimental psychology. General, Apr 18, 2024
The presence of fear: how subjective fear, not physiological arousal, shapes the experience of presence
When we become engrossed in novels, films, games, or even our own wandering thoughts, we can feel... more When we become engrossed in novels, films, games, or even our own wandering thoughts, we can feel present in a reality distinct from the real world. Although this subjective sense of presence is, presumably, a ubiquitous aspect of everyday conscious experience, the mechanisms that produce it are not known. Correlational studies conducted in virtual reality have shown that we feel more present when we are afraid, motivating claims that physiological arousal contributes to presence; however, such causal claims have yet to be evaluated. Here, we report two experiments that test the causal role of subjective and physiological components of fear in generating presence. In Study 1, we validated a virtual reality simulation capable of inducing fear. We asked participants to rate their emotions while they walked across a wooden plank that appeared to be suspended high above a city street; at the same time, we recorded heart rate and skin conductance levels. Height exposure increased ratings of both fear and presence, and also increased physiological arousal. Although presence and fear ratings were positively correlated during height exposure, presence and physiological measures were unrelated. In Study 2, we manipulated whether the plank appeared to be at height, or on the ground. Using a mediational approach, we found that the relationship between height exposure and presence on the plank was fully mediated by self-reported fear, and not by physiological arousal. Findings point to the importance of subjective emotional experience in informing the feeling that we are physically situated within a reality.
I am indebted to many people for their support, friendship and guidance over the last three years... more I am indebted to many people for their support, friendship and guidance over the last three years. First, and foremost, I am extremely grateful to my supervisor Associate Professor Jason Low. Thank you for your persistent faith in my abilities and your enduring patience as my understanding grew, often slowly and through error. I am certain this dissertation would not have been possible without your unwavering encouragement in the face of adversity. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Dr. Stephen Butterfill for his insight and helpful feedback. In addition, I extend my thanks to Dr. Hannes Rakoczy for his evaluation of the present experiment, and also to Dr. Alia Martin for her thoughts about how to more clearly organize these experiments for presentation. Next, I must recognize my colleagues in the ToM lab. I am forever grateful to Katheryn Edwards, an intellectual giant whose counsel and comradery steadied my resolve on numerous occasions. I also wish to thank Schyana Sivanantham, Claudie Peloquin, Radhika Patel-Cornish, Tui Shaw, and Cong Fan for tolerating my unconventional, borderline-obsessive occupation of our shared workspace. Outside of Victoria University, I am grateful to my dear friends and creative collaborators Kalani Muller and Pani Stavrou-Wilson, whose respective artwork is displayed herein in the form of the procedural figures (see figures 2, 3, and 9) and the state-analysis figures (see figures 8, 10 11 and 14). I
False Belief Understanding: On Cognitive Development, Cognitive Competence & Cognitive Systems
Wiley eBooks, Jan 13, 2020
Cognitive developmental changes in belief understanding, particularly how and when children come ... more Cognitive developmental changes in belief understanding, particularly how and when children come to first appreciate false beliefs, occupy the bulk of research on human mindreading. Given apparently conflicting evidence from direct and indirect false‐belief tasks, there is much debate over whether there is a major conceptual breakthrough in belief reasoning sometime around children's 4th birthday and whether infants should be credited with abstract belief understanding. Focusing on who has belief concepts and when they have them, however, is only part of the developmental story. The contradiction could also reflect how the mature belief reasoning that children grow into involves two kinds of mindreading solutions: a flexible cognitive system for making sophisticated but effortful ascriptions about others' beliefs and an efficient cognitive system for tracking others' beliefs in an efficient but limited manner
Walk the plank! Using mobile electroencephalography to investigate emotional lateralization of immersive fear in virtual reality
Royal Society Open Science, May 1, 2023
Most studies on emotion processing induce emotions through images or films. However, this method ... more Most studies on emotion processing induce emotions through images or films. However, this method lacks ecological validity, limiting generalization to real-life emotion processing. More realistic paradigms using virtual reality (VR) may be better suited to investigate authentic emotional states and their neuronal correlates. This pre-registered study examines the neuronal underpinnings of naturalistic fear, measured using mobile electroencephalography (EEG). Seventy-five healthy participants walked across a virtual plank which extended from the side of a skyscraper—either 80 storeys up (the negative condition) or at street level (the neutral condition). Subjective ratings showed that the negative condition induced feelings of fear. Following the VR experience, participants passively viewed negative and neutral images from the international affective picture system (IAPS) outside of VR. We compared frontal alpha asymmetry between the plank and IAPS task and across valence of the conditions. Asymmetry indices in the plank task revealed greater right-hemispheric lateralization during the negative VR condition, relative to the neutral VR condition and to IAPS viewing. Within the IAPS task, no significant asymmetries were detected. In summary, our findings indicate that immersive technologies such as VR can advance emotion research by providing more ecologically valid ways to induce emotion.
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), Sep 1, 2022
Emotion in Motion: Perceiving fear in the behaviour of individuals from minimal motion capture displays
The ability to quickly and accurately recognise emotional states is adaptive for numerous social ... more The ability to quickly and accurately recognise emotional states is adaptive for numerous social functions. Although body movements are a potentially crucial cue for inferring emotions, few studies have studied the perception of body movements made in naturalistic emotional states. The current research focuses on the use of body movement information in the perception of fear expressed by targets in a virtual heights paradigm. Across three studies, participants made judgments about the emotional states of others based on motion-capture body movement recordings of those individuals actively engaged in walking a virtual plank at ground-level or 80 stories above a city street. Results indicated that participants were reliably able to differentiate between height and non-height conditions (Studies 1 & 2), were more likely to spontaneously describe target behaviour in the height condition as fearful (Study 2) and their fear estimates were highly calibrated with the fear ratings from the t...
The Promises and Pitfalls of Virtual Reality
Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences
Walk the plank! Using mobile electroencephalography to investigate emotional lateralization of immersive fear in virtual reality
Royal Society Open Science
Most studies on emotion processing induce emotions through images or films. However, this method ... more Most studies on emotion processing induce emotions through images or films. However, this method lacks ecological validity, limiting generalization to real-life emotion processing. More realistic paradigms using virtual reality (VR) may be better suited to investigate authentic emotional states and their neuronal correlates. This pre-registered study examines the neuronal underpinnings of naturalistic fear, measured using mobile electroencephalography (EEG). Seventy-five healthy participants walked across a virtual plank which extended from the side of a skyscraper—either 80 storeys up (the negative condition) or at street level (the neutral condition). Subjective ratings showed that the negative condition induced feelings of fear. Following the VR experience, participants passively viewed negative and neutral images from the international affective picture system (IAPS) outside of VR. We compared frontal alpha asymmetry between the plank and IAPS task and across valence of the cond...
The presence of fear: how subjective fear, not physiological arousal, shapes the experience of presence
When we become engrossed in novels, films, games, or even our own wandering thoughts, we can feel... more When we become engrossed in novels, films, games, or even our own wandering thoughts, we can feel present in a reality distinct from the real world. Although this subjective sense of presence is, presumably, a ubiquitous aspect of everyday conscious experience, the mechanisms that produce it are not known. Correlational studies conducted in virtual reality have shown that we feel more present when we are afraid, motivating claims that physiological arousal contributes to presence; however, such causal claims have yet to be evaluated. Here, we report two experiments that test the causal role of subjective and physiological components of fear in generating presence. In Study 1, we validated a virtual reality simulation capable of inducing fear. We asked participants to rate their emotions while they walked across a wooden plank that appeared to be suspended high above a city street; at the same time, we recorded heart rate and skin conductance levels. Height exposure increased ratings...
Launching Your VR Neuroscience Laboratory
Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences
Don't look down: The impact of virtual fear on inhibitory control
An investigation into whether and how fear modulates response inhibition in humans.
From the Lab to the Street: Investigating the effect of antecedent- and response-focused emotion regulation strategies in an Ecologically Valid Fear-induction Paradigm
In this Experiment, we will investigate the effectiveness of instructed emotion regulation strate... more In this Experiment, we will investigate the effectiveness of instructed emotion regulation strategies on emotional responding in an ecologically valid emotion induction paradigm in Virtual Reality.
Fear and Presence in Virtual Reality
Ecological validity in affective and cognitive neuroscience: A mobile EEG study
This study aims at comparing the ability of Virtual Reality and picture presentation (IAPS) to in... more This study aims at comparing the ability of Virtual Reality and picture presentation (IAPS) to induce fear, as measured in subjective, physiological, and neural measures. Data collection has been concluded and 89 healthy adults were tested with two emotion induction tasks, the first one an interactive Virtual Reality simulation and the second one presentation of IAPS images. Each consists of an emotional condition and a neutral condition, presented in a randomized order. In the VR task, participants are asked to walk on a wooden plank which is placed on the ground (neutral) or floating over the abyss on a skyscraper (emotional). The IAPS tasks comprise neutral and negative images. To assess emotional lateralization on a neurophysiological level, mobile EEG signal is recorded. At various timepoints during the experiment, self-reported anxiety and heart rate as a psychophysiological measure are obtained.
Walk the Plank! Using mobile EEG to investigate emotional lateralization of immersive fear in virtual reality
1.SummaryMost studies on emotion processing rely on the presentation of emotional images or films... more 1.SummaryMost studies on emotion processing rely on the presentation of emotional images or films. However, this methodology lacks ecological validity, limiting the extent to which findings can generalize to emotion processing in the wild. More realistic paradigms using Virtual Reality (VR) may be better suited to investigate authentic emotional states and their neuronal correlates. This preregistered study examines the neuronal underpinnings of naturalistic fear, measured using mobile electroencephalography (EEG). Seventy-five healthy participants entered a simulation in which they walked across a virtual plank which extended from the side of a skyscraper – either 80 stories up (the negative condition) or at street level (the neutral condition). Subjective ratings showed that the negative condition induced feelings of fear and presence. Following the VR experience, subjects passively viewed negative and neutral images from the International Affective Picture system (IAPS) outside o...
Exploration of Relations between Belief-Tracking and Motor Processing using a new Ecologically-Valid Helping Task for Adults
Three experiments investigated efficient belief tracking as described by the two-systems theory o... more Three experiments investigated efficient belief tracking as described by the two-systems theory of human mindreading (Apperly & Butterfill, 2009) whereupon mindreading implies the operation of a flexible system that is slow to develop and cognitively effortful, and an efficient system which develops early but subject to signature limits. Signature limits have been evidenced by children’s and adults’ difficulty anticipating how someone with a false belief (FB) about an object’s identity, will act. In a recent investigation of signature limits, erroneous pre-activation of the motor system was detected when adults predicted the actions of an agent with an identity FB, suggesting that efficient mindreading and motor processes are linked (Edwards & Low, 2017). Moreover, young children differentiated between true and FBs about an object’s location, but not identity, as revealed by the object children retrieved in an active helping task (Fizke et al., 2017). The aim of the present thesis w...
False‐Belief Understanding
An Assessment of Treatment Option Used to Decrease Packing Behavior During Mealtime
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Papers by Christopher Maymon