1. A general overview on Virtual Reality 10
1.3. Usage of VR in cognitive sciences 25
1.3.3 Research 30
Finally, in research field incredible efforts have been done to validate, improve and better understand the proper use of this technology, too. As usual, there is quite a distinction between the “applied” purposes of the researches (studies on usability, human-computer interaction, and so on) and the “basic” research which aims to investigate human cognitive processes and behaviors by means of Virtual Environments appositely built to expose the human subjects to a desired setting for the experiments, with the desired set of variables and stimuli.
Just to make some examples, VR applications have been used for the investigation of components of cognitive processes, included executive functions (Elkind et al., 2001; Morganti 2004), memory (Matheis et al., 2007), spatial abilities (Parsons et al., 2004; Wolbers et al., 2004 Iachini & Ruggeri, 2006), attention processes (Parsons et al., 2007) and learning (Waller, 2000; Chen et al., 2003).
The more investigated cognitive aspect is probably the one of spatial cognition (Tlauka & Wilson 1996; Albert et al., 1998; Richardson et al., 1999; Albert et al., 1999). As we will see also in the Chapter 3, the research on spatial processes has almost completely transferred the old labs’s setting in the new artificial environments, benefiting of the possibility to completely recreate some environments (including the representation of existing ones) without having to build them in the reality or bringing the subjects to these places. According to Rizzo et al. (2002), “Virtual environment technology may provide
unique assets for targeting spatial abilities with its capacity for creating, presenting, and manipulating dynamic 3D objects and environments in a consistent manner and for the precise measurement of human interactive performance with these stimuli”.
Not only VEs can be employed to easily perform spatial experiments and tasks, but also the benefits that cognitive modeling can enjoy from the direct interpretation of results in these fields are huge: for example, Zhang (2008) used VEs researches' findings to propose a
multiscale progressive model which describes the relationship between spatial knowledge and spatial tasks in navigation.
As always happens in sciences, all research fields are strictly interconnected, since in order to be correctly used, a tool must first be scientifically evaluated and, from the other side, the use that people do and the way they interact with the tool itself is a necessary information that the investigator has to know before using a certain tool or to build the tool itself. A validation of the VR as a research tool can come also indirectly, for example observing the results of rehabilitation programs and training of specific abilities, such as the most famous application of VR in trainings, that is the laparoscopic technology’s virtual simulation for surgeons (see Sutherland et al., 2006 for a review). And also studies in the applied research field can give an indirect but useful information about how people interact, uses, perceives and behaves in VR. By means of all the information coming from these different areas of scientific psychology, every result can be ascribed to the fundamental question, which is still to be clearly defined: are the human cognitive processes the same in Virtual and in Real Environments? Or do the experiments which take place in VEs exert in the subjects some different kind of brain processes that are somehow and somewhat different from the ones that they would employ in a similar setting, but real?
The question is fundamental especially for basic research, because of the large use of Virtual experimental settings to test and verify psychological and cognitive models of functioning in humans. This mass-use of the VR technology requires a strong validation of the tool itself, in order to be sure that the subjects behave in a certain way in a certain VE because the simulated environment or experimental setting is really realistic, and stimulates the same cognitive processes that researchers are actually investigating and not other ones, which occur only in VR but not in the real life, where they could be different or could be following different rules and modalities.
In turn, having a clear idea of how does cognition work in VEs is an helpful thing which can shed more light on the usability of the same, and directs programmers and computer scientists on their work of building VEs and tools in a way that is everyday better and realistic. It helps also the scientists which are interested in rehabilitation and trainings, since their work with VR will be for sure more successful and effective.
Anyway, despite all the positive reports about the use of VR in cognitive studies and researches, there are some authors who prefer to have a more cautious approach to this argument, and remark some issues that are still not clarified and could represent an obstacle to VR employment in research concerning cognitive processes. As Armbrüster and
coll. (2008) point out, there are some limitations to VR applications, for example they remind that in experimental psychological research, it isn’t often useful to use environments with much visual information as, for example, secondary depth cues or stereoscopic vision, as they may cause confounding effects on the visual scene, and investigated processes may not be genuine. Moreover, inter-individual differences (for example, in depth perception) are known to occur also in REs, and it is not answered yet if generalizability is given when using VR as a research tool, particularly when the data depend on correctly perceived distances, for example the use of spatial clues, navigation and so on.