James Blascovich - US grants

Attitudes are thought to serve many functions. They influence perception and information processing. This proposal seeks to identify a function that to this point has only ben suggested, namely, the facilitative effects of attitudes on decision making in stressful contexts. We know from prior psychophysiological work that tasks involving active coping with threat or challenging evoke greater increments in heart rate, cardiac output, systolic blood pressure, and myocardial contractility. The issue of this research is whether an individual coping with a threat in a situation involving well-established attitudes will show less reactivity than an individual in a novel (attitudinal) setting. The strength of the proposal is that it melds psychophysiological measurement with expertise in attitudinal measurement and induction to provide an answer to this important question. The combination of these two approaches is novel and important, and promises much information on the interaction of social cognition (attitudes) and physiology. This research could add appreciably to out understanding of the effects of stress on human functioning and performance.

ABSTRACT The precipitation of arousal as well as its maintenance, reduction, and enhancement are the focus of arousal regulation theories in the fields of personality, social psychology, and psychophysiology. Arousal regulation theories in these fields have advanced markedly over the last three decades reflecting increased theoretical and methodological sophistication. Yet, these advances have occurred relatively independently. Because arousal regulation processes are multiply determined, integration of diverse theories and methods should advance understanding of arousal regulation processes substantially. This research will examine the viability of the biopsychosocial (BPS) arousal regulation model. The BPS model is applicable to a broad range of arousal-based psychological phenomena and behaviors. Recent BPS research has demonstrated consistently that cognitive appraisal of potentially evocative situations mediates physiological responses such that challenge appraisals result in increased myocardial reactivity and threat appraisals in increased vascular reactivity. These data represent the first demonstration of the fractionation of cardiovascular responses as a function of categorically different appraisals of an active coping task. This research will help disentangle apparently conflicting literatures linking cardiovascular reactivity to both performance increments and increased risk for heart disease. The experimental tests of the BPS model proposed are based on theoretical and empirical work from diverse areas including affect, self-esteem, and mere presence. A series of five experiments employing both self-report and physiological measures will examine intrapersonal and interpersonal variable moderating cognitive appraisal and autonomic reactivity as specified in the BPS model. The results of this research will not only have important implications for the BPS model but also for theory and research in the domains of the moderating variables (e.g., affect and self- esteem) themselves. In addition, the results of the research will have direct implications for cardiovascular and mental health.

State-of-the-art virtual environment technology immerses individuals in illusory physical and social environments which are under the complete control of the virtual environment creators. People act relatively unrestrictedly and in real time within such virtual environments. This fact has broad implications for basic and applied research in the behavioral, educational, and social sciences. This project focuses on immersive virtual environments as a basic research tool in four substantive areas: Learning, visual perception, social interaction and social influence, and spatial cognition. The research will help to answer basic theoretical research questions, and will establish the validity and reliability of immersive virtual environments as a research tool.

The project will use immersive virtual environments to understand learning of scientific systems, including: presence (i.e., the feeling of immersion or being in a virtual representation of the scientific system such as a heart or a lung); guidance (i.e., free vs. guided exploration within a three-dimensional representation); realism (i.e., abstract vs schematic virtual representation); and verbal augmentation (i.e., audible narrative). The project will also use immersive virtual environments to investigate basic perceptual mechanisms underlying distance perception, perceptual-motor transformations (i.e., perceptual correction of visual distortions caused by external factors such as prisms), and perception of lightness and shape. Immersive virtual environments will also be used to explore and identify nonverbal communication characteristics that are essential to meaningful social interaction within and outside of virtual environments, and to conduct studies on fundamental social influence processes (i.e., social facilitation/inhibition, group risk taking, and ostracism) within virtual environments. Within the area of spatial cognition, the project will investigate how individuals aggregate local cognitive maps into global ones, and to investigate basic properties of alignment effects (i.e., how an individual's body orientation affects acquisition of spatial knowledge).

This is a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER). The purpose of the project is to provide an empirical assessment of the value of immersive virtual environments as a methodological tool in social psychology. Virtual environment technology has advanced to the point where freely-mobile individuals can be placed into contexts that simulate physical and social environments. While this technology has broad commercial relevance, it also has important potential for the social and behavioral sciences. This potential has not received much scientific or scholarly study, which is the purpose of this exploratory investigation.

This Advanced Training Institute in Social Psychology will provide intensive training in the use of immersive virtual environment technology as a methodological tool for social psychology. Institute Fellows will receive appropriate methodological, technology, software, and data collection training to enable them to use state-of-the-art immersive virtual technology to perform social psychology experiments. The advanced training institutes will take place during summers at the Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

This project focuses on facilitating and augmenting social interaction in virtual environments, particularly immersive virtual environments. Virtual environment technology allows individuals to freely move about digital "worlds" in real time observing and interacting with the environment and
virtual others within it. Increased sophistication of virtual environment technology and digital imaging of people promises a new age for technologically mediated social interaction of geographically separated individuals. However, in order to implement such interaction virtually in
meaningful and productive ways, an understanding of the parameters of people's perceptions of each other's non-verbal signals (e.g., facial expressions, gestures, gaze) within virtual environments is necessary. Such an understanding will provide a hierarchical taxonomy of the necessary and
sufficient non-verbal signals that are critical to social interaction within virtual environments and, therefore, must be tracked and rendered among interactions in virtual environments. Realizing the objectives of the proposed project will advance scientific understanding in the areas of social interaction and non-verbal behavior, human participation in collaborative virtual environments, and technological (e.g., computer vision) aspects of automated tracking and rendering of human on-verbal signals.

This project examines the use of immersive virtual environment technology for eyewitness identification of criminal suspects. This technology allows individuals to enter and move about three-dimensional digital "worlds" in real-time, observing and interacting with the environment and virtual others within it. The rapid development of immersive virtual environment technology and increased sophistication in three-dimensional digital imaging of people promises a new age for determining accuracy of eyewitness identification of criminal suspects. This is important societally as the general accuracy of eyewitness identification of criminal suspects using older technologies (e.g., police lineups, mug shots) has been questioned in the research literature as well as in the judicial system.

The scientific goals of the project are threefold. First, the investigators will determine the validity of using digital representations of humans within immersive virtual environments for person recognition. Second, they will determine differences between traditional and immersive virtual police lineups in terms of eyewitness identification accuracy focusing on the increased contextual realism described above. Finally, the investigators will use immersive virtual environment technology to develop quantitative indexes of fairness of such lineups based on the similarity of suspects to foils.

Immersive virtual environment technology allows easier recreation of the same environmental conditions under which an eyewitness viewed criminal activity involving suspects. Replicating such conditions is not easily accomplished using older technologies. Hence, using immersive virtual environment technology, witnesses can be asked to identify suspects and foils at the same distance, viewing angle, lighting, weather (e.g., rain, fog) as was the case during their observation of the criminal activity. Furthermore, this technology makes it easier to match foils to suspects in terms of organismic variables (e.g., height, weight, hair style, coloring), clothing, and movements thereby eliminating potential sources of bias. This technology also allows the quantitative assessment of how well suspects and foils are matched as opposed to pure subjective assessment using older technologies.

The major goal of this research is to understand and test theories of mediated communication in collaborative virtual environments. It will examine how well humans are adapting to the quickly evolving digital technologies used in modern communication and social interaction systems. This work will explore the boundaries that are beyond what we normally consider normal, mediated communication and instead delve into a phenomenon called Transformed Social Interaction, a strategy that allows users to systematically filter their physical appearance and social behaviors (as represented by avatars) in the eyes of their conversational partners, amplifying or suppressing features and nonverbal signals in real-time for strategic purposes such as persuasion, learning, memory, and liking. This goal will be accomplished by using well-accepted methods to study multi-person social interaction using networked virtual reality technology, and the research will focus on three categories of transformations: Self representation (altering an avatar's appearance, voice, and nonverbal behavior), Social-Sensory abilities (giving interactants tools that provide unique perspectives and up-to-date summaries of the social behaviors of others) and Social Environment (changing aspects of the social context to maximize interaction goals).

Transformed Social Interaction is relevant not just to collaborative virtual environments but to any form of communication medium that uses digital representations of people - cell phones, videoconferences, textual chat rooms, online videogames, and many other forms of digital media. Currently, over 60 million people use Internet chat per day. In Korea, it is estimated that 1/20th of the general population spend a significant amount of time in online video games interacting with digital representations of other people. Cell phones are ubiquitous and now include digital photograph and video capabilities. Companies actually offer face tracking and rendering on cell phone avatars. In any communication medium in which there is a digital representation of another person, transformed social interaction is not only possible, it is inevitable. The use of transformed social interaction has the potential to drastically change the nature of distance education, communication practices, political campaigning, and advertising. Consequently, it is crucial to understand both the effectiveness of these transformations as well as people's ability to detect them.

This project will employ a cyclical two-step process to develop a computational model that embeds dynamic expression and socially engaging non-verbal gestures into talking avatars, and experimentally tests its usability within digital virtual environments involving human-digital agent interaction. Specifically, the research objectives of this project include: (1) synthesis of expressive talking faces and modeling of dynamic facial expressions, (2) synthesis of socially engaging non-verbal facial gestures, and (3) in-depth usability studies on resultant avatars.

Digital immersive virtual environment technology has enormous implications for human-computer interaction. Many qualities of digital human representations, particularly those of human-appearing agents, are important for social engagement and social influence. In particular, non-verbal behaviors play a critical role. Among such behaviors, arguably the most important are facial expressions of emotion, which are critical for meaningful renderings of digital agents. To date, computational models that would permit such renderings are less than optimal. Indeed, an applicable and systematic computational model for rendering spontaneous, on-the-fly non-verbal facial gestures and integrating them with speech has not been created.

The success of this proposed project will remove a major barrier to the widespread application of useful digital human representation technology for all applications in which computer-mediated communication can play a role, including commerce, education, health, engineering, and entertainment applications. In addition, it will have far-reaching scientific implications, providing a computationally tractable mechanism for embedding human qualities into computer-controlled entities that are used in other scientific and engineering fields.