Project Title:Simulating the Feelings of Reality: Using Virtual Reality to Understand How Emotion Shapes Autobiographical Memory
Grant Recipient: Adam Redman Congleton
Place of Employment: Aarhus University
Awarded Amount: 1.806.343 kr.

Project Description: Our personal memories play a vital role in how we interact with and form representations of the world. These “autobiographical memories” serve a variety of purposes, including providing us with information we use when solving problems, maintaining our social relationships, and establishing our personal identities. These memories are influenced by a variety of factors, including how emotionally arousing our experience was and whether we viewed it as positive or negative. Thus, developing techniques that more effectively capture emotion’s influence is essential for understanding how our personal memories are shaped. Problematically, the majority of research in this area has been unable to examine what happens when people initially experience events, as these events occur in people’s private lives outside the laboratory. Studies have instead focused on simply asking people to recall their memories, with no control over what information was encountered, making it difficult to draw conclusions from their results. This project proposes that virtual reality simulation provides an ideal solution to this problem of experimental control. Virtual reality is a computer-created sensory world that simulates a person’s physical presence in real-life scenes, and its use allows researchers to know ahead of time what information will be encountered by their participants. Utilizing such technology, this project will investigate exactly how emotion shapes our personal memories.

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