Colin Ellard – Navigation in real and virtual environments

      The virtual reality environment provides an ideal experimental tool with which to investigate the nature of human spatial representations. High quality virtual reality provides an unprecedented mixture of high ecological validity and high experimental control. This makes it possible to present human beings with a variety of different types of wayfinding problems in which the quality, nature and configuration of physical space can be manipulated with ease, while maintaining the participant in a closed environment that allows close measurement their movements.

      In the future, I plan to use such tools to continue my investigation of the basic processes underlying wayfinding behaviour in human beings, with a particular emphasis on comparisons with wayfinding behaviours in non-humans. I also envision an exciting new focus of laboratory research with a more applied focus. I am particularly interested in understanding the manner in which the unique character of human spatial cognition contributes to our perceptions of spatial legibility in the built environment, perceived walkability in urban settings and, in general, the aesthetics of space. Are the principles that underlie our spatial behaviour relevant to decision-makers who design hospitals, nursing homes, factories, or even urban streetscapes? How do such principles vary across the lifespan? I am actively seeking community partners who are interested in helping me to form research questions or sharing my results.

Daniel Smilek – Collaborative, embodied cognition

     I conduct research on collaboration and the role of attention in real world settings. Virtual reality technology would afford me a degree of experimental control in the design of complex environments to conduct such experiments.

David Moscovitch –Understanding phobias and other anxiety disorders

      Virtual reality is becoming increasingly integrated into treatment protocols for phobias and other anxiety disorders. Not only could I use the unique capabilities of the proposed system as an extremely interesting tool for research, but I anticipate that it could be a powerful treatment tool for the new Centre for Mental Health Research.

Erik Woody – Security motivation

      We have recently proposed the existence of a security motivation system (Szechtman & Woody, 2004; Woody & Szechtman, 2005). This system, which is biologically primitive, evolved for the detection and amelioration of potential danger. When the system appraises a situation as potentially dangerous, it produces a motivational state experienced as anxiety and activates a set of species-typical behaviours having the goal of protection from potential threat to self and others. These species-typical behaviours include symptoms seen in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), such as cleaning, checking, and hoarding, and the associated thoughts. Because the security motivation system is oriented around potential, rather than present, danger, reality-based consummatory stimuli for it do not exist and cannot serve as a terminator. Instead, we propose that what shuts down security activity is an internally generated “feeling of knowing” that serves both as the phenomenological sign of goal attainment and also as the physiological mechanism that terminates security motivation and the experience of anxiety. In such an open-ended motivational system, the feeling of knowing stems directly from performance of the behaviours evoked by the motivation—such cleaning, checking, and the like.

      Our theory of OCD is that OCD symptoms represent the dysfunctional expression of the security motivation system. For the OCD patient, the normal feedback mechanism is insufficient, and therefore performance of security related behaviours fails to terminate the activity of the security motivation system in the normal way. Failure to generate the feeling of goal attainment or “feeling of knowing” leads to exaggerated, prolonged performance of security-related responses and hence yields the symptoms characteristic of OCD. Thus, we propose that OCD represents the breakdown of a satiety-like mechanism that normally terminates the species-specific motivation of protection from harm.

      A virtual reality environment is ideal for testing this theory, both to evaluate the normal function of the security motivation system and its pathological breakdown. By putting participants in a number of environments that can activate security motivation, we can study the factors that promote, exacerbate, and inhibit the activity of the system. For instance, a number of scenarios can be tested, ranging from the participant leaving his or her home to entering a potentially threatening territory. The kinds of stimuli that activate the system can be studied and the participants’ responses such as checking and other precautionary actions, tracked and evaluated. Such knowledge of how subjects behave in situations of potential threat will be informative not only in testing our theory and understanding psychopathology, but may have also wider practical applications in developing automated systems for detection of behavioural markers of an activated security motivation that may be used, for instance, in security surveillance.

Mark Zanna

     "By creating alternative Virtual Worlds in which members of stigmatized groups (e.g., the elderly) are depicted and treated more positively than they are in the 'real world' (e.g., neither ignored nor patronized), I plan to study how stereotypes and prejudices might be reduced or, even, eliminated."

Myra Fernandes

The influence of background context on perception and memory of faces 

      My research investigates how we encode new information, how it is organized and represented in the brain, and how we reactivate the information during retrieval, with particular emphasis on how these change as people age. Using virtual reality we are investigating how the background context in which you meet a person, or encounter an event, can influence how that information is perceived and later remembered. Knowing how context influences cognitive processing would allow a more dynamic conceptualization of how memory operates in the real world, where memories are created and remembered in various milieus which could indirectly influence performance. This research will also identify ways in which age-related deficits in memory can be reduced.

Jonathan Oakman

James Danckert

Mike Dixon

Jennifer La Guardia

Roxane Itier