Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.S.

Program

Cognitive Neuroscience

Advisor

Tony Ro

Subject Categories

Life Sciences | Medicine and Health Sciences

Keywords

Virtual Reality, Binaural Beats, Cognitive Neuroscience, VIMS, SMS, SSQ

Abstract

Visually induced motion sickness (VIMS), a subset of motion sickness, has been a long-term obstacle preventing comfortable experiences in virtual reality (VR). There is a growing body of research showing that binaural beats (BBs) have been effective to influence aspects of cognition. The goal of this experiment was to investigate the possible effects of attending to BBs and any changes to the severity of VIMS symptoms following immersion in a virtual reality environment (VRE). To validate our hypothesis a repeated-measures, between-subjects experiment was designed (n=16) and an alpha (10Hz) frequency BB and a control audio were created. Participants were split into groups and initially attended to 10 minutes of the experimental or control audios before entering the VRE. They then switched audio conditions before a second VR session. Participants quantified the severity of their symptoms using the simulator sickness questionnaire (SSQ). The results indicate a significant difference in disorientation scores depending on the audio condition, specifically that participants reported less severe disorientation when they had listened to the BB rather than the control audio prior to entering the VRE. These findings could have significant implications for research using BBs as well as the future of VR development.

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