Virtual Reality: A New Tool for Interdisciplinary Psychology Research

Virtual reality (VR) has the potential to become a powerful scientific research tool for psychologists. VR serves as a bridge between different disciplines of psychology. Findings in one area are often easily applied to others, encouraging researchers who use VR to collaborate with experts from various fields. To support these claims, I will describe VR research on the following psychological topics, spanning several levels of analysis and several disciplines of psychology. In the process, I will describe how these various levels of analysis can inform and build upon each other. 1. Perception: Tactile augmentation, a technique for giving VR users the sensation of "touching" virtual objects with their real hands. 2. Memory and Cognition: Virtual-Reality monitoring, the decision process by which people try to distinguish memories of real events from memories of virtual events. 3. Clinical Psychology: VR exposure therapy for treatment of spider phobia: A case study. 4. Medical applications of VR: Use of VR t...