title: Electrophysiological measurement of interest during walking in a simulated environment.
abstract: A reliable neuroscientific technique for objectively estimating the degree of interest in a real environment is currently required in the research fields of neuroergonomics and neuroeconomics. Toward the development of such a technique, the present study explored electrophysiological measures that reflect an observer's interest in a nearly-real visual environment. Participants were asked to walk through a simulated shopping mall and the attractiveness of the shopping mall was manipulated by opening and closing the shutters of stores. During the walking task, participants were exposed to task-irrelevant auditory probes (two-stimulus oddball sequence). The results showed a smaller P2/early P3a component of task-irrelevant auditory event-related potentials and a larger lambda response of eye-fixation-related potentials in an interesting environment (i.e., open-shutter condition) than in a boring environment (i.e., closed-shutter condition); these findings can be reasonably explained by supposing that participants allocated more attentional resources to visual information in an interesting environment than in a boring environment, and thus residual attentional resources that could be allocated to task-irrelevant auditory probes were reduced. The P2/early P3a component and the lambda response may be useful measures of interest in a real visual environment.
authors.affiliation: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba, Japan. Electronic address: yuji-takeda@aist.go.jp.
authors.forename: Yuji
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Takeda
authors.affiliation: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba, Japan.
authors.forename: Takashi
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Okuma
authors.affiliation: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba, Japan.
authors.forename: Motohiro
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kimura
authors.affiliation: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba, Japan.
authors.forename: Takeshi
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Kurata
authors.affiliation: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba, Japan.
authors.forename: Takeshi
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Takenaka
authors.affiliation: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba, Japan.
authors.forename: Sunao
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Iwaki
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003265:Contingent Negative Variation / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004777:Environment; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology*; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D013997:Time Factors; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D016138:Walking / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Event-related potentials; Eye-fixation-related potentials; Interest; Simulator; Task-irrelevant probe