Very interesting work! Is this a within or between participants design? Also, you mention that you can apply this to VR in pain and anxiety, and I was wondering how you think it applies.
This is a within-participants design, so each participant experiences both the 3-dimensional and 2-dimensional meditation conditions. Also, for the pain and anxiety application, we aim to leverage distraction to quantify immersion in virtual reality. The secondary task we are using in this quantification is a detection-response task, which introduces real-world, physical stimuli while the participants are immersed in the virtual environment. If the results demonstrate that participants are less distracted from the primary meditation task in the 3-dimensional (virtual reality) condition, we can begin to conclude that the levels of immersion produced by virtual environments are significant enough to draw their attention away from the physical stimuli more than in the 2-dimensional condition. Therefore, we can investigate the use of immersion in virtual reality similarly being used to take patients’ attention away from painful stimuli. This has begun to be investigated in patients undergoing injections or IV placements, and preliminary results are demonstrating that immersion in virtual environments results in lower self-reports of pain and anxiety compared to controls. We aim to apply this method to patients with chronic pain.
Very interesting work! Is this a within or between participants design? Also, you mention that you can apply this to VR in pain and anxiety, and I was wondering how you think it applies.
This is a within-participants design, so each participant experiences both the 3-dimensional and 2-dimensional meditation conditions. Also, for the pain and anxiety application, we aim to leverage distraction to quantify immersion in virtual reality. The secondary task we are using in this quantification is a detection-response task, which introduces real-world, physical stimuli while the participants are immersed in the virtual environment. If the results demonstrate that participants are less distracted from the primary meditation task in the 3-dimensional (virtual reality) condition, we can begin to conclude that the levels of immersion produced by virtual environments are significant enough to draw their attention away from the physical stimuli more than in the 2-dimensional condition. Therefore, we can investigate the use of immersion in virtual reality similarly being used to take patients’ attention away from painful stimuli. This has begun to be investigated in patients undergoing injections or IV placements, and preliminary results are demonstrating that immersion in virtual environments results in lower self-reports of pain and anxiety compared to controls. We aim to apply this method to patients with chronic pain.
Thanks for the very informative and thoughtful response!