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Minaxi Goel – CogSci

Minaxi Goel received her MS  in Cognitive Science (CogSci). Her  research work was supervised by Dr. Priyanka Srivastava. Here’s a summary of  Minaxi Goel’s M.S thesis, Psycho-Motor And Psycho-Physiological Correlates Of Affective-State While Exploring 360° Videos Using Head-Mounted Virtual Reality as explained by her: 

The growing scope of virtual reality (VR) applications demonstrates the potential to address burgeoning problems in today’s and future world. The power of VR comes through the sense of embodiment, allowing people to experience the virtual environment from a first-person perspective. It empowers the experiencer to perceive a real-world inside the simulated world, breaking the limits of the physical dimension, further enabling the capturing of natural psychological, behavioural and physiological responses as one would manifest in real-life situations. These measures act as a magnifying glass to understand the underlying perception and cognition processes of every interaction made with the environment. This thesis studies the affective-state (psychological), psycho-motor (behavioural) and skin conductance (physiological) response to the affective stimuli projected through VR. The stimuli consist of pleasant and unpleasant videos varied across valence and arousal dimensions, selectively chosen from the VR Stanford affective database (Li et al. 2017). In this research, emotional affective state was studied by asking participants to rate their feeling after exploring each video by using the self-assessment manikin (SAM) scale. We chose Skin-Conductance Response (SCR) to measure physiological response corresponding to the affective state while exploring the affective videos and used head-tracking data to measure the psycho-motor scanning behaviour in correspondence with the affective state. We conducted two studies, in which we used HMD to display the 360° affective videos to the participants. Participants were asked to explore the video, as they would do in real world, by making their head movement in all the three directions, i.e. yaw (left-right head movement), pitch (up-down head-movement) and roll (shoulder-tilt head-movement). The first study focuses on the physiological and psychological relationship with VR emotional stimuli with an objective to find differences in SCR data in response to varying emotional stimuli. This was a pilot study carried out with 10 volunteers, and all were shown 10 videos (5 pleasant and 5 unpleasant). We observed no significant difference in physiological activity while exploring pleasant as compared to unpleasant emotional videos. The second study focuses on the behavioural and psychological relationship with VR emotional stimuli to analyse the differences in head-orientation in all the three directions while exploring pleasant and unpleasant videos. Here, 30 volunteers participated, and all were shown 4 videos (2 pleasant and 2 unpleasant), pseudo-randomly selected from 10 videos (5 pleasant and 5 unpleasant). We observed a significant positive correlation between the standard deviation of head-movement and valence and a significant positive correlation between scanning speed and valence. Participants showed natural exploring behaviour in the region-wise analysis, where they primarily explored the front view and rarely explored the rear-view.

In the second study, we also assessed the individual predispositional emotional state by using Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI) which groups the participants into minimal, mild, moderate and severe categories. The assessment was performed, keeping in view the increasing worldwide prevalence of depression and the current state of the art, demanding the need for the alternative assessment measures and diagnostic solutions where one-to-one supervision is not required. This is because the doctor patient ratio is too low, leading to huge gap, and the traditional methods involve subjective measures and interviews, making the whole process gradual and inaccessible. VR has the potential to bridge this gap by providing objective assessment measures and remotely accessible solutions. For this, the current research also compares the affective state and scanning behaviour across different depression groups. The relation between virtual affective experience and 360° exploration behaviour is discussed in light of the BDI categories.