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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."
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
It's not dead, it's pining for the fjords.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Interesting article. But I don't think it reaches the conclusion that you're suggesting.
So basically fMRI studies are only as good (or as bad) as the statistical analysis you do of the data. Which is probably the case for a large portion of modern science.
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?
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 dead salmon study had nothing to do with fMRI per se, it had to do with correction for multiple comparisons. fMRI measures hemodynamic brain activity at thousands of separate locations. If you don't correct the statistics for multiple comparisons you will get false positives. Even in a dead salmon.
This study may be unimpressive (I haven't read it yet), but not because of dead salmon.
Heh! Well yes there are chemical reactions involving the breakdown and decay of biological tissue, but the methods used in conventional functional MRI wouldn't be sensitive to that. The dead salmon result has everything to do with statistical correction for multiple comparisons, or lack thereof.
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?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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.