Michael Wilkinson

North Carolina State University | NCSU · Department of Psychology

Emotion is critical to human experience and is an integral part of perception, cognition, and behavior. While the mechanisms and precise measurement of emotion has been debated in the literature, researchers have theorized that emotion is related to activation across physiological, experiential, and behavioral response systems. This has important i...

Within distracting environments, it is difficult to maintain attentional focus on complex tasks. Cognitive aids can support attention by adding relevant information to the environment, such as via augmented reality (AR). However, there may be a benefit in removing elements from the environment, such as irrelevant alarms, displays, and conversations...

This study investigates placebos and video games’ usefulness as psychological research tools. One proposed underlying mechanism of the placebo effect is participants’ expectations. Such expectation effects exist in sports psychology and healthcare domains, but inconsistent findings have emerged on whether similar effects impact a participants’ cogn...

Virtual reality technology is constantly improving such that a virtual environment is more like a physical one. However, some research evidence suggest that certain virtual reality scenarios are less real than others to human observers (e.g., experience of falling from a high place) leading to potential limitations of using virtual reality as a res...

The development of head-mounted display virtual reality systems (e.g., Oculus Rift, HTC Vive) has resulted in an increasing need to represent the physical world while immersed in the virtual. Current research has focused on representing static objects in the physical room, but there has been little research into notifying VR users of changes in the...

Emotion is critical to human experience and is an integral part of perception, cognition, and behavior. While the mechanisms and precise measurement of emotion has been debated in the literature, researchers have theorized that emotion is related to activation across physiological, experiential, and behavioral response systems. This has important i...

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...