Supporting data for "The Role of Attention in the Development of Cybersickness"

<p dir="ltr">This dataset consists of supporting data for the thesis project "The Role of Attention in the Development of Cybersickness". Cybersickness refers to the phenomenon in which people experience motion sickness symptoms in virtual reality (VR).</p><p dir="ltr">The current thesis project has two primary goals: 1.) to determine the exact role of attention in the development of cybersickness, and 2.) to conduct a conceptual replication of some previously reported intervention effects on cybersickness. In our efforts to review the current evidence on this topic, we realize there was a lack of sufficiently powered studies that specifically tested the role of visual role in regulating experienced cybersickness. Some of the existing studies that directly/indirectly tested the relationship between attention and cybersickness had questionable statistical power and methodologies, which may challenge the validity and generalizability of the effect, as well as the exact strength of the actual effect. In the following chapters, we conducted a series of experiments that aim to address these two goals.</p><p dir="ltr">We tested the role of different aspects of human attention in the development of cybersickness. The dataset includes our findings on the issues, in which we tested for the effect of 1.) size of visual attention, 2.) spare attentional resources, and 3.) attention to the scene on experienced cybersickness.</p><p dir="ltr">In Chapter 2, we tested the effect of the distribution size of visual attention on cybersickness. Current literature on the relationship between field-of-view (FOV) and self-reported cybersickness generally suggests the possibility of narrowing visual attention to mitigate experienced cybersickness. However, the observation by Wei et al. (2018) challenges this hypothesis, which found that subjects who demonstrated a wide distribution of visual attention during vection tend to be those who had a lower score of self-reported motion sickness susceptibility. Our first study tested both possibilities with a replication of Wei et al. (2018) as well as a direct manipulation of visual attention size during VR exposure.</p><p dir="ltr">In Chapter 3, we tested the role of spare attentional resources in determining experienced cybersickness. Existing studies that attempted to limit attentional resources by implementing a cognitive task in virtual reality had yielded inconsistent results. There was a lack of strong evidence to show that high cognitive load (i.e., low spare attentional resources) could prevent cybersickness. Sepich et al. (2022) indicate that the lack of attentional resources may lead to the development of cybersickness being unregulated, yet their results could also be attributed to another confounding factor. Our second study provided a well-powered experiment on the topic while controlling for the potential confounder in Sepich et al. (2022).</p><p dir="ltr">In Chapters 4, 5, and 6, we tested whether varying levels of attention spent on the motion cues from the virtual scene would induce changes in cybersickness. We utilized three behavioral methods to conceptually manipulate attention to the scene, first by varying the level of integration of the cognitive task with the virtual environment (Chapter 4), then by implementing a virtual nose to facilitate one’s sense of belonging in the virtual world (Chapter 5), and finally by introducing airflow in a virtual stimulation where it is expected (Chapter 6). All of these manipulations may enhance the sense of presence, which could result in a higher level of attention spent in processing the visual cues from the virtual scene.</p>