Empathy For Virtual Characters Studied With FMRI Brain Imaging 52
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."
Re:The Psychopath Test (Score:4, Insightful)
Gömböc (Score:3)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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
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Hell, even if traffic laws didn't, running out into the highway (or just stopping your car on it) is not exactly safe. The nice thing to do would be to rescue the thing, but not at significant risk to your own health/life.
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memorize plausible answers that cause your Voight-Kampff lie detector to display "inconclusive".
It's not the answers, it's the reaction that counts.
The same is true of anything else that behaves like a polygraph. A question with a memorized answer elicits a different reaction from an unexpected question. So if you start getting a bunch of memorized-answer reactions among the populace, you're going to have to rotate in different questions.
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Also, reminds me of Robocop (the series...) noting a pol
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You no longer have to guess -- now you can ask these two. [nydailynews.com]
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kind of clever (Score:3)
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.
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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.
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You didn't actually read the article you linked to, did you?
fMRI? (Score:2, Insightful)
Didn't an animal study in 2009 or so show that fMRI was fundamentally flawed, as it showed brain activity in DEAD salmon?
Ah, here it is:
http://blogs.scientificamerica... [scientificamerican.com]
Re:fMRI? (Score:5, Funny)
It's not dead, it's pining for the fjords.
Re:fMRI? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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True, but this isn't the case. In the case of the dead fish, they didn't filter the results (google "multiple comparisons correction") and got bullshit data because of it.
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All that proves is why multiple comparisons correction is so important, and why everyone uses it.
NPC (Score:2)
Brain scans and actions aside, did they question the people who didn't save the NPC, or were they asked to act as if everything in the simulation was real?
Without the last instruction, my thought would have been "screw the NPC, I'm not going to fail the test for a virtual
And no, I didn't RTFA.
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Reading about this test kind of reminded me of the test given to Wesley Crusher [wikipedia.org] in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
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You don't need to know why, because what they were measuring is what steers the reasoning. You either have the emotional response or you don't.
To be honest... (Score:2)
There are days that I can rarely work up empathy for real people.
Coincidentally, those are the days that I have to drive on the 405. I wonder if there is a connection?
Virtusl mapping of brain areas (Score:1)
> virtual dangerous fire escape
"After further study to discern the validity of the virtual-to-real world response, we have decided to rename the region of the brain that lit up in the rescuers as the "minimaxxer seeking rare drops" area and that of those who just fled as the "IDGAF trolls hahahablongota".
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Shouldn't the DIAF acronym work into your analysis somewhere?
Hey Buddy (Score:2)
How much virtual money is your virtual life worth? 10k fakecoins and I'll help you escape...
Would take a long time but... (Score:2)
...They should make someone play FF7 and run this test at the point where Aerith(/Aeris) dies.
Which fMRI studies to trust? (Score:1)
The brain is a big place, and fMRI is used to study all of it because its the best method available for non-invasive study of the human brain. Some sub-fields of fMRI are pretty solid, the vision stuff for example is generally high quality. Other areas in fMRI are rife with over-interpreted and poorly controlled studies. Social neuroscience is perhaps the worst.
Depends (Score:3)
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?
Control issues? (Score:1)
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In the study itself, they mention that the participants were given a tutorial on how the controls worked - there were only apparently a few buttons and they were all very simple to understand (one was "move" and one was "push"). What I'm wondering about is whether this one effect that I don't think has a name came into play. According to the study, to free the trapped character, the participants had to push the "Push" button a total of 41 times. There were a few participants who started pushing and didn't f
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I see issues either way (Score:3)
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".
On the other hand... (Score:2)
...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.
Perhaps this just shows the difference between types of people that compete vs. cooperate or selfish vs. selfless. Personally, I hope that if I'm ever in a situation like that for real, I'm the latter type of person.
Good to lose (Score:2)
The Thai government taught me, years ago, that sometimes it is better to lose than to win, because you do not want to become what you would have to be in order to win. In that case the choice was to let the militants go free or to slaughter them. The Thai government, wisely, let them go.
In amother case the Lao government invaded Thailand and occupied a refugee camp where the refugees from Laos were staging attacks into Laos. The camp was on the top of a hill. The Thai border police surrounded the bottom
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Might want to look up slave morality though. Those who refuse to eat monsters just make them well fed. Would I want to be "friends" with people that expect me to dive under the bus when useful to them? Reciprocity rarely exists in reality, mostly just the pretense wrapped in sophistry, and it's assumption is of no utility when you lose more than you gain.
Mostly I leave people the fuck alone and wish they neutrally fucked off. Even the wel
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You are good; he is a monster. In order to devour him you must become a greater monster than he is. After you have consumed him, the world still has one monster in it (you), but it is a bigger monster than the one it had previously. And now, as a monster, you are hungry, and we must play the game all over again. Who will step forward to become a triple-sized monster to devour you?
Share everything you do with the NSA - they are monster killers.
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I noticed this before (Score:1)