Our paper in PLoSONE

Good start for 2017: our paper is in PLoSONE!

I’m especially proud of this study, not only because I had the opportunity to work with these people, but also because we made a strong case of when virtual reality is useful to answer questions about “real reality”. In a few words: we asked participants to judge the distance of a christmas gift box, while we manipulated whether the box was on an upward/downward slope or on a flat ground. They saw the same visual scene in all these conditions, so any difference in the visual distance judgement between conditions is attributable to only the tilt of the head. Crazy? You see the same thing, but what you perceive is different depending on your head’s position.

Further, we applied galvanic vestibular stimulation when participants saw these christmas boxes. This is a cool device, which, using a small electric current, elicits a tilting sensation. This made the judgement differences even larger, strengthening our point that there is visuovestibular multisensory link in visual (!) distance perception.

If you are interested in the details, here is the paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169990

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