Seeing in Slow Motion: Manipulating Arousal in Virtual Reality

The only evidence that seeing in slow-motion exists comes from retrospective interviews. An ongoing debate is whether this phenomenon exists as a figment of memory or a true function of visual perception. Testing these speculations is difficult given slow-motion experience is often associated with intense, stressful, and even threatening situations that dramatically heighten arousal. Virtual reality systems might provide an opportunity to study the experience online, thus offering insights into the speculated mechanisms. This study explores the feasibility to induce heightened arousal and its possible implications on perceptual encoding of information. Participants were exposed to various situations designed to influence arousal as measured by heart rate, and an implicit memory task was used for each situation to test perceptual processing. This study did not reveal performance gains associated with increased physiological arousal.