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Empathy For Virtual Characters Studied With FMRI Brain Imaging
vrml (3027321) writes "A novel brain imaging study published by the prestigious Neuroimage journal sheds light on different reactions that players' brains display when they meet a virtual character in a game world. While their head was inside a fMRI machine, participants played an interactive virtual experience in which they had to survive a serious fire emergency in a building by reaching an exit as soon as possible. However, when they finally arrived at the exit, they also found a virtual character trapped under an heavy cabinet, begging them for help. Some participants chose not to help the character and took the exit, while others stopped to help although the fire became more and more serious and moving away the cabinet required considerable time. Functional brain imaging showed activation of very different brain areas in players when they met the character. When there was an increased functional connectivity of the brain salience network, which suggests an enhanced sensitivity to the threatening situation and potential danger, players ignored the character screams and went for the exit. In those players who helped the character, there was an engagement of the medial prefrontal and temporo-parietal cortices, which in the neuroscience literature are associated with the human ability of taking the perspective of other individuals and making altruistic choices. The paper concludes by emphasizing how virtual worlds can be a salient and ecologically valid stimulus for modern social neuroscience."
Video games could be a reliable test of an individual's capacity for empathy. Like, if you kill all the Little Sisters, you're definitely a monster in real life.
.. for whoever gets first post
Really this is more about finding a way to collect proxy data for neuroscience, than about studying virtual worlds (despite the /. title). A problem with FMRi studies is that it's often hard to get people to both do what you want to study, and have them be hooked up to the FMRi at the same time. Videogames have the desirable property that people can do things in a "world" while conveniently keeping their head physically parked in the lab.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
While their head was inside a fMRI machine
Keep in mind that this is the same technology that found significant mental activity in a dead fish.
Ignoring the above and just going by the conclusion, it looks like it's just a case of 'players who expect a trap will not assist the NPC.'
Didn't an animal study in 2009 or so show that fMRI was fundamentally flawed, as it showed brain activity in DEAD salmon?
Ah, here it is:
http://blogs.scientificamerica...
-Styopa
So we will now know why all the little girls go googly for poor Ophelia when she takes her bath?
Brain scans and actions aside, did they question the people who didn't save the NPC, or were they asked to act as if everything in the simulation was real?
Without the last instruction, my thought would have been "screw the NPC, I'm not going to fail the test for a virtual
And no, I didn't RTFA.
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There are days that I can rarely work up empathy for real people.
Coincidentally, those are the days that I have to drive on the 405. I wonder if there is a connection?
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
> virtual dangerous fire escape
"After further study to discern the validity of the virtual-to-real world response, we have decided to rename the region of the brain that lit up in the rescuers as the "minimaxxer seeking rare drops" area and that of those who just fled as the "IDGAF trolls hahahablongota".
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
How much virtual money is your virtual life worth? 10k fakecoins and I'll help you escape...
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
...They should make someone play FF7 and run this test at the point where Aerith(/Aeris) dies.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
and a new new study says most press releases and news bulletins talking about fMRI are basically totally unsound bullshit that could make a sociologist blush.
Is the NPC rescue a quest?
Is it likely to give significant XP/Gold?
Does the NPC respawn even after I've rescued it once?
I wonder if some of the people who refused to help the NPC were simply not too familiar with first-person games and confused about the controls? Moving a cabinet and pulling up a person to safety are things that could require complex interactions with the environment and many of the participants in the test were probably just getting used to walking around.
Maybe they didn't help because the "person" wasn't real. Or, maybe they did help because they weren't in real physical danger. I don't know how relevant either is to the "real world".
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
The brain is a big place, and fMRI is used to study all of it because its the best method available for non-invasive study of the human brain. Some sub-fields of fMRI are pretty solid, the vision stuff for example is generally high quality. Other areas in fMRI are rife with over-interpreted and poorly controlled studies. Social neuroscience is perhaps the worst.
...when they finally arrived at the exit, they also found a virtual character trapped under an heavy cabinet, begging them for help. Some participants chose not to help the character and took the exit, while others stopped to help although the fire became more and more serious and moving away the cabinet required considerable time.
Perhaps this just shows the difference between types of people that compete vs. cooperate or selfish vs. selfless. Personally, I hope that if I'm ever in a situation like that for real, I'm the latter type of person.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
A tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can't, not without your help, but you're not helping. Why is that?
Traffic law forbids me to stop my vehicle on the interstate highway. That and a tortoise's shell has a ridge down the middle to help it flip back over. With practice, it will manage.
You know, if you keep repeating the script for your empathy test in public, people are going to catch on and memorize plausible answers that cause your Voight-Kampff lie detector to display "inconclusive". An insect lands on my arm while I'm watching the local weather forecast? Flick it off. That's why real life psychological tests are kept under non-disclosure agreement.
would all run for the door whilst proclaiming that they will return and help...
synethetic mechanism, I see if then set flag enable interrupt handler to sound card, etc.
Computer games are so much less entertaining when you have written pieces of them. I certainly don't feel for a character when I'm using half my available brain power trying to figure out the best way to implement something that happens on screen.
The Thai government taught me, years ago, that sometimes it is better to lose than to win, because you do not want to become what you would have to be in order to win. In that case the choice was to let the militants go free or to slaughter them. The Thai government, wisely, let them go.
In amother case the Lao government invaded Thailand and occupied a refugee camp where the refugees from Laos were staging attacks into Laos. The camp was on the top of a hill. The Thai border police surrounded the bottom of the hill, and sat there until the Lao army went home. No war.
In this case the choice is to rescue a fellow human trapped in a burning building, or to ignore his pleas and let him burn. Would you want to be friends with someone who did that? IN THAT REALITY, the pleader is a real person and decent people will treat him as such. I would help save the guy, because I do not want to be the kind of person who could let him die.
in one game (mmo) I played you had a quest to release 4 prisoners from this evil guy, there were 5 prison cells though. Its one of those quest you would repeat every 3 days or so when it came off cooldown. Everytime I would release that last prisoner even though it had no actual purpose in completing the quest. It made me ponder about empathy. I asked if anyone else does this and got a mixed response of answers. Some did, some didn't. *note: numbers might be a little off but story is true