The Journey From Nonimmersive to Immersive Multiuser Applications in Mental Health Care: Systematic Review.

Background: Over the past 25 years, the development of multiuser applications has seen considerable advancements and challenges. The technological development in this field has emerged from simple chat rooms through videoconferencing tools to the creation of complex, interactive, and often multisensory virtual worlds. These multiuser technologies have gradually found their way into mental health care, where they are used in both dyadic counseling and group interventions.

Incidental temporal binding in rats: A novel behavioral task.

We designed a behavioral task called One-Trial Trace Escape Reaction (OTTER), in which rats incidentally associate two temporally discontinuous stimuli: a neutral acoustic cue (CS) with an aversive stimulus (US) which occurs two seconds later (CS-2s-US sequence). Rats are first habituated to two similar environmental contexts (A and B), each consisting of an interconnected dark and light chamber. Next, rats experience the CS-2s-US sequence in the dark chamber of one of the contexts (either A or B); the US is terminated immediately after a rat escapes into the light chamber.

Cognitive Remediation in Virtual Environments for Patients with Schizophrenia and Major Depressive Disorder: A Feasibility Study.

Standard approaches to cognitive remediation can suffer from limited skill transferability to patients' life. Complex virtual environments (VEs) enable us to create ecologically valid remediation scenarios while preserving laboratory conditions. Nevertheless, the feasibility and efficacy of these programs in psychiatric patients are still unknown.

Mapping the Scene and Object Processing Networks by Intracranial EEG.

Human perception and cognition are based predominantly on visual information processing. Much of the information regarding neuronal correlates of visual processing has been derived from functional imaging studies, which have identified a variety of brain areas contributing to visual analysis, recognition, and processing of objects and scenes. However, only two of these areas, namely the parahippocampal place area (PPA) and the lateral occipital complex (LOC), were verified and further characterized by intracranial electroencephalogram (iEEG).

Path integration in large-scale space and with novel geometries: Comparing vector addition and encoding-error models.

Path integration is thought to rely on vestibular and proprioceptive cues yet most studies in humans involve primarily visual input, providing limited insight into their respective contributions. We developed a paradigm involving walking in an omnidirectional treadmill in which participants were guided on two sides of a triangle and then found their back way to origin. In Experiment 1, we tested a range of different triangle types while keeping the distance of the unguided side constant to determine the influence of spatial geometry.

How Much of What We Learn in Virtual Reality Transfers to Real-World Navigation?

Past studies suggest that learning a spatial environment by navigating on a desktop computer can lead to significant acquisition of spatial knowledge, although typically less than navigating in the real world. Exactly how this might differ when learning in immersive virtual interfaces that offer a rich set of multisensory cues remains to be fully explored. In this study, participants learned a campus building environment by navigating (1) the real-world version, (2) an immersive version involving an omnidirectional treadmill and head-mounted display, or (3) a version navigated on a desktop computer with a mouse and a keyboard.

Virtual microscope interface to high resolution histological images.

The Hypertext Atlas of Dermatopathology, the Atlas of Fetal and Neonatal Pathology and Hypertext Atlas of Pathology (this one in Czech only) are available at http://www.muni.cz/atlases.