Decoding subjective emotional arousal from eeg during an immersive virtual reality experience
- Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany
- University of Sussex, United Kingdom
Abstract
Immersive virtual reality (VR) enables naturalistic neuroscientific studies while maintaining experimental control, but dynamic and interactive stimuli pose methodological challenges. We here probed the link between emotional arousal, a fundamental property of affective experience, and parieto-occipital alpha power under naturalistic stimulation: 37 young healthy adults completed an immersive VR experience, which included rollercoaster rides, while their EEG was recorded. They then continuously rated their subjective emotional arousal while viewing a replay of their experience. The association between emotional arousal and parieto-occipital alpha power was tested and confirmed by (1) decomposing the continuous EEG signal while maximizing the comodulation between alpha power and arousal ratings and by (2) decoding periods of high and low arousal with discriminative common spatial patterns and a Long Short-Term Memory recurrent neural network. We successfully combine EEG and a naturalistic immersive VR experience to extend previous findings on the neurophysiology of emotional arousal towards real-world neuroscience.
Data availability
We did not obtain participants' consent to release their individual data. Since our analyses focus on the single-subject level, we have only limited data which are sufficiently anonymized (e.g., summarized or averaged) to be publicly shared. Wherever possible, we provide "source data" to reproduce the manuscript's tables and figures (Figures 2, 4, 8 and 10). The scripts of all analyses are available at https://github.com/SHEscher/NeVRo
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (13GW0206)
- Felix Klotzsche
- Michael Gaebler
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Alexander Shackman, University of Maryland, United States
Ethics
Human subjects: Participants signed informed consent before their participation, and the study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Department of Psychology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (vote no. 2017-22).
Version history
- Preprint posted: October 25, 2020 (view preprint)
- Received: November 11, 2020
- Accepted: October 27, 2021
- Accepted Manuscript published: October 28, 2021 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: December 15, 2021 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2021, Hofmann et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Decoding subjective emotional arousal from eeg during an immersive virtual reality experience
eLife 10:e64812.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.64812
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