Consciousness Club Tokyo
Consciousness Club Tokyo
http://conscious-machine.org/club/
Speaker: Keisuke Suzuki (University of Sussex)
Title: Studying Atypical Visual Consciousness with Virtual Reality
Venue: Araya, Inc., Tokyo, Japan (http://www.araya.org/eng)
Date and Time: June 22, 2017, 7-9 PM JST
Abstract:
Virtual Reality (VR) technologies have been used to study bodily self-consciousness by inducing atypical bodily experiences (e.g. full body illusion (Lenggenhager et al 2007)), but have not adapted very much to study the visual experiences. Here, I am going to talk about our recent VR studies focusing more on the visual domain of conscious experiences. First, I will illustrate a new augmented reality setup to control sensorimotor coupling of 3D objects which people can interact with in an immersed condition. This new tool allows us to investigate how disturbed sensorimotor coupling could affect our visual perceptions to external objects. I will report our recent finding that veridical sensorimotor coupling facilitates the formation of visual awareness of an object faster compare to the disturbed sensorimotor coupling. This would be a new evidence to support the embodied and enactive view to the conscious experience. Second, I will describe the Hallucination Machine, a new tool simulating visual hallucinations by combining Deep Dream algorithm and Substitutional Reality (Suzuki & Wakisaka et al 2012). Hallucination Machine simulates various types of visual hallucinations in a biologically plausible and ecologically valid way, which could be potentially used to study altered state of consciousness without directly altering the underlying neurophysiology.
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