Using EEG to Decode Subjective Levels of Emotional Arousal During an Immersive VR Roller Coaster Ride

Emotional arousal is a key component of a user's experience in immersive virtual reality (VR). Subjective and highly dynamic in nature, emotional arousal involves the whole body and particularly the brain. However, it has been difficult to relate subjective emotional arousal to an objective, ne...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:2018 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR) pp. 605 - 606
Main Authors: Klotzsche, F., Mariola, A., Hofmann, S., Nikulin, V. V., Villringer, A., Gaebler, M.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.03.2018
Subjects:
Applied computing-Life and medical sciences-Consumer health
Brain modeling
Electroencephalography
Feature extraction
Human-centered computing-Human computer interaction (HCI)-HCI design and evaluation methods-Laboratory experiments
Neuroscience
Oscillators
Resists
Virtual reality
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Emotional arousal is a key component of a user's experience in immersive virtual reality (VR). Subjective and highly dynamic in nature, emotional arousal involves the whole body and particularly the brain. However, it has been difficult to relate subjective emotional arousal to an objective, neurophysiological marker-especially in naturalistic settings. We tested the association between continuously changing states of emotional arousal and oscillatory power in the brain during a VR roller coaster experience. We used novel spatial filtering approaches to predict self-reported emotional arousal from the electroencephalogram (EEG) signal of 38 participants. Periods of high vs. low emotional arousal could be classified with accuracies significantly above chance level. Our results are consistent with prior findings regarding emotional arousal in less naturalistic settings. We demonstrate a new approach to decode states of subjective emotional arousal from continuous EEG data in an immersive VR experience.
DOI:10.1109/VR.2018.8446275