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Playing games in virtual reality (VR) could be an essential tool in the treatment of people with neurological conditions such as autism, schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease.
According to a recent study from the University of Waterloo, technology could help people with these conditions to change their perception of time, which these conditions cause them to perceive differently.
"The ability to accurately estimate the pbadage of time is fundamental to our ability to interact with the world," says co-author Séamas Weech, a postdoctoral researcher in kinesiology. "However, for some people, the internal clock is unsuitable, resulting in timing issues affecting perception and action.
"Studies like ours help us understand how these deficiencies might be acquired and how to recalibrate temporal perception in the brain."
The UWaterloo study involved 18 women and 13 men with normal vision and no sensory, musculoskeletal or neurological disorder. The researchers used a virtual reality game, Robo Recall, to create a natural environment conducive to recalibrating the perception of time. The key manipulation of the study was that researchers badociated the speed and duration of visual events with the participant's body movements.
The researchers measured participants' time perception abilities before and after exposure to the dynamic virtual reality task. Some participants also performed time perception tasks other than virtual reality, such as throwing a ball, for control comparison purposes.
The researchers measured the actual and perceived durations of a moving probe in time perception tasks. They discovered that the manipulation of virtual reality was badociated with a significant reduction in participants' time estimates of about 15%.
"This study provides further evidence that the perception of time is flexible and that virtual reality offers a potentially valuable tool for recalibrating time in the brain," said Weech. "It offers a compelling application for rehabilitation initiatives that focus on how the perception of time is worsening in some populations."
Weech adds, however, that while the effects have been strong in this study, further research is needed to determine their duration and whether these signals are observable in the brain. "To develop clinical applications, we need to know if these effects are stable a few minutes, days or weeks later, a longitudinal study would provide the answer to this question."
"Virtual reality technology has evolved considerably," said Michael Barnett-Cowan, a professor of neuroscience at the Department of Kinesiology and senior author of the article. "Virtual reality is now convincingly changing our experience of space and time, allowing fundamental research in perception to better understand how brain brains of normal, injured, elderly and sick populations work and how to treat them. optimal way. "
The article, "Time flowing in motion according to virtual reality causes temporal recalibration" was written by Ambika Bansal, Séamas Weech and Michael Barnett-Cowan, and published in Scientific reports.
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Material provided by University of Waterloo. Note: Content can be changed for style and length.
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