Virtual View: experiment 3 setup

For the design of the third experiment I got advice from Petra van der Schaaf, environmental psychologist. The main research question for this experiment is: does animation have added value in the restorative effect of natural stimuli?
So far I’ve tested the stimuli in sets containing 6 or 12 slides. The sound didn’t have a direct relation to the images. In this experiment I want to take the stimulus a step further.
I’ve been working on a program to produce randomised computer generated landscapes which consists of hills with shrubs and water. On top of that different animated elements are projected: clouds, flocks of birds, bees, butterflies, blossom leaves and waves on the water.
All the elements move at their own speed and behave in an appropriate manner. By pressing certain keys I can make the elements appear and disappear from the screen. That way I constructed a scenario which I recorded on video. The stimulus isn’t responding to the heart-rate yet because I want to gain insight into the effects of animation. This way I’m sure the whole group gets the same input. Sound artist Julien Mier continued to work on the sounds and made a score to match the images and direction of movement on the screen.

Design

Due to lack of participants I had to reduce my conditions from 4 to 2, focussing on my own animation instead of also testing photo realistic versions. I worked with two groups: one group viewed the full video with accompanying sound. The other group got the full soundtrack but viewed only a still from the animation. That way I can test for the possible added effects of the animation element.

Subjective tension

The variables to be tested (the dependant variables) are:
Subjective feeling of tenseness. Participants score on the statement: “I feel tense.” This is measured on a 7 point likert scale going from not at all to the most tense ever. Beats per minute, inter beat interval (calculated from BPM), heart-coherence, heart-rate variability and Galvanic skin response. To measure the latter I used a separate device, the Mindtuner, which Malcolm from Heartlive kindly lend me. Two electrodes are placed around two fingers. A drawback is that the data is output in a separate file so I will have to do some data cleaning later to match the data with the events. But it will be nice to see how the skin conductivity behaves as this is a good indicator of stress.

Timeline

The experiment starts with the measurement for subjective tenseness. This is followed by a 5 minute baseline measurement where people are asked to relax while looking at a black screen. After reading instructions participants engage in a cognitive stress task. They have to do subtractions within a limited time span. The more correct answers they give the shorter the time they have to do the calculations. There are 27 calculations in the task. Depending on the speed of the participants this task takes around 2 minutes. They then have to fill in the subjective tenseness questionnaire again. Then they watch either the five minute animation with sound or the still with sound. The experiment finishes after they have filled in the tension questionnaire.

labAtBKKC

The lab is located in a separate room at the BKKC office. Participants are seated at a table at 200 cm from a TV screen. The image shown is 84,5 x 61,5 cm. The sound was play using an active noise cancellation headphone (Bose Quiet Comfort 25). We choose these headphones because the building is located close to railway and a lot of office noises penetrate into the lab.

Many thanks go to BKKC for their support with the promotion and organisation of the experiment. Special thanks go to Hans and Laetitia. Without their help this experiment would have been impossible.

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