2019 Volume 58 Issue 3 Pages 324-331
Virtual reality (VR) has been applied in cognitive neuroscience research in the last few decades. Researchers have been interested in neural responses to unique experiences that are difficult to realize in real experimental situations, but possible in VR, including operating airplanes and addressing phobic objects. Furthermore, using VR for clinical purposes such as rehabilitation has also been steadily growing. In this section, we first introduce to common neuroimaging techniques (EEG, fMRI, fNIRS) and summarize some of the recent works, in which the brain activities were monitored in VR. We then report preliminary results from two experiments which we carried out with using VR-fNIRS. In the first study, we compared prefrontal activities during watching a short film in VR with watching the same movie in PC monitor. In the second study, we monitored prefrontal activity during VR-technical training. Last, future perspectives of VR-fNIRS for industrial application will be discussed.
