Using Illusions to Exploring Inner Realities

The way social psychologist Jim Blascovich tells it, a casual encounter with perceptual psychologist Jack Loomis in 1995 when Blascovich was a recent arrival at UCSB ended up creating a new team effort in shaping immersive virtual environment technology (IVET), popularly known as virtual reality, as a research tool.

Curious about how Loomis was using interactive, video-projected environments, Blascovich asked to don the head-mounted display that controls the user's visual field. "I looked, and I said, 'Gee, do you know what a social psychologist could do with this?'

"Jack replied, 'Yes, I do, and I think we ought to do it.' So we became a team."

Loomis believed that IVET could be used to probe more than visual and spatial processes, explained Blascovich: "It was important that social behaviors and social interactions could be studied using this technology. Jack was very prescient in knowing that."

With a grant from the Office of Research's program Research Across Disciplines, the psychologists' advanced their ideas and the technology. In 1998 they landed a $1.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation to found a Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior. The center supports exploration in the areas of learning, visual perception, spatial perception and cognition, and social interactions.

Controlling what people see creates major influences on their behavior. Creating a computer-generated environment that people accept as real opens doors to research that would otherwise be very expensive, or possibly hazardous, to conduct. An IVET experiment can control many more elements than one constrained by physical reality, Blascovich noted, and "you can have exact replication of your experiments."

He also pointed out that social psychology has a well-established tradition of using illusion and actors to study behaviors. He and many others have employed such techniques in the past.

To explore risk-taking in gambling behavior, he set up an experimental casino when he was a graduate student at the University of Nevada, Reno. That was a form of "virtual reality; it just happened to be...built with hammers and nails," he said.

The Chicago native received a Ph.D. in social psychology from UNR in 1972, spent nearly eight years at Marquette University in Madison, Wisc., and about 15 at the State University of New York at Buffalo. There he directed the Center for the Study of Behavioral and Social Aspects of Health , a multidisciplinary organized research unit housed in the Psychology Department.

Blascovich, now the chair of UCSB's Psychology Department, specializes in understanding what are called challenge and threat behaviors. He has spent years researching and writing about the physiological and psychological aspects of potentially stressful situations, and their impacts on the cardiovascular system.

Long interested in the uses of computer technology--he had his own database consulting business in the 1980s--Blascovich is currently designing a study of the cardiovascular effects of violent game playing. He will compare participants' reactions to a shooting game using a desktop station to reactions to the game in an immersive setting. He expects that "in an immersive environment, cardiovascular reactions will be stronger than in the desktop situation, but that participants will eventually become desensitized using this type of media, much like they have become to violence on television."

He said he feels this type of research will help stimulate informed discussion of the technology that could lead to public policy decisions before IVET is widespread.