The use of Virtual Reality (VR) in interactive studies is becoming increasingly popular. Despite its popularity to use Virtual Characters (VC) instead of confederates in VR studies, the effect of...Show moreThe use of Virtual Reality (VR) in interactive studies is becoming increasingly popular. Despite its popularity to use Virtual Characters (VC) instead of confederates in VR studies, the effect of VCs on humans has not been sufficiently studied yet, especially regarding scratching behaviour. The present explores the effect of the presence or absence of a VC on humans’ scratching behaviour. There are two rationales behind the assumption that VCs affect scratching behaviour. The first is that scratching is shown more frequently under stress, but the presence of VCs can reduce stress. The second one is that participants want to adhere to social norms in front of a VC, which condemn scratching. For the present study, participants (n = 38) were immersed in a virtual environment using a Head-Mounted-Display. They had to describe itch-inducing pictures either while a VC was present or absent. The frequency and duration of the scratching behaviour of participants were recorded. Two two-sided paired t-tests were conducted to compare both scratch frequency and scratch duration in the VC present versus the VC absent condition. The findings show that the participants scratched less often and with a shorter duration when the VC was present compared to when the VC was absent, indicating that the presence of VCs can alter humans’ scratch behaviour. The results of this study can help to establish the use of VCs further and lay the foundation for a more in-depth investigation into scratch behaviour using virtual environments. However, more research is needed to investigate the underlying reasons for the observed behaviour.Show less
The prospect of reward has increasingly been shown to influence modes of cognitive control. Recent work by Fröber and Dreisbach (2016) showed that performance contingent reward increases proactive...Show moreThe prospect of reward has increasingly been shown to influence modes of cognitive control. Recent work by Fröber and Dreisbach (2016) showed that performance contingent reward increases proactive control, while non-contingent reward decreases proactive control and possibly increases reactive control. According to the Metacontrol State Model (Hommel, 2015), the differential effects of reward on cognitive control can be understood as a tradeoff between cognitive persistence and flexibility. Persistence refers to a mode of control that allows for strong maintenance of goal-relevant information and the suppression of irrelevant information, while flexibility refers to a mode of control that facilitates switching between tasks by allowing for more efficient consideration of irrelevant information. While evidence suggests that contingent reward promotes persistence and non-contingent reward decreases persistence, it is not clear whether non-contingent reward promotes flexibility. The aim of the present study was to expand on previous findings by investigating whether contingent reward promotes persistence and whether non-contingent reward promotes flexibility, by employing two cognitive tasks that presumably benefit from either persistence or flexibility, namely the Simon task and the Attentional Blink task. Participants were allocated to three conditions (e.g., contingent, non-contingent, and control) and performed both tasks in a single session. Participant allocation and task completion were counterbalanced. Both performance contingent and non-contingent reward promoted cognitive flexibility in the Simon task, or at least decreased cognitive persistence, but had no effect in the Attentional blink task. While these results support the general finding that reward differentially modulates cognitive control, they further underline the importance of considering the cognitive paradigm used to assess changes in cognitive control.Show less
