About
42
Publications
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669
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Introduction
I am interested in interdisciplinary approaches challenging the big questions on the evolution of the human brain and the interaction between humans and the environment.
I am currently working at the University of Bergen, Norway.
Additional affiliations
September 2018 - August 2022
September 2014 - August 2018
November 2013 - June 2014
Education
August 2015 - June 2016
August 2013 - June 2015
October 2009 - November 2012
Publications
Publications (42)
Scientific research has widely examined the therapeutic and health benefits of being in contact with natural environments. Nature walk have been proposed as a cost-effective and inclusive method for successfully exploiting nature for the promotion of health and well-being. Depression and anxiety symptoms have been shown to benefit from nature walk....
Various lines of evidence have shown that nature exposure is beneficial for humans. Despite several empirical findings pointing out to cognitive and emotional positive effects, most of the evidence of these effects are correlational, and it has been challenging to identify a cause-effect relationship between nature exposure and cognitive and emotio...
Exposure to natural environments has positive psychological effects. These effects have been explained from an evolutionary perspective, emphasizing humans’ innate preference for natural stimuli. We tested whether top-down cognitive processes influence the psychophysiological effects of environments. The source of an ambiguous sound was attributed...
Do humans have a hard-wired tendency to respond with positive affects to nature or do individual's meanings and learning experiences moderate the affective responses to natural or urban scenes? We studied the relative contributions of inherited dispositions and individual factors (childhood and current nature exposure, nature connectedness) on imme...
Exposure to natural environments promotes positive psychological effects. Experimental studies on this issue typically have not been able to distinguish the contributions of top-down processes from stimulus-driven bottom-up processing. We tested in an online study whether mental imagery (top-down processing) of restorative natural environments woul...
Virtual reality (VR) presents numerous opportunities for training skills and abilities through the technology’s capacity to simulate realistic training scenarios and environments. This can be seen in how newer research has emphasized how VR can be used for creating adaptable training scenarios. Nevertheless, a limited number of studies have examine...
Love is a worldwide known phenomenon that affects many aspects of human life, including considering a romantic partner with whom to bond. Thus, developing a reliable and valid measure of love experiences is crucial. One of the most popular tools to test love levels is Sternberg's 45-item Triangular Love Scale (TLS-45), which measures three love com...
Virtual reality systems are increasingly being used for the enhancement of human health. One of the most popular applications of
virtual reality technology over the past few years has been for
the management of stress in both the clinical and general population. Recently published research has shown the viability and
acceptability of the use of vir...
People across the world and throughout history have gone to great lengths to enhance their physical appearance. Evolutionary psychologists and ethologists have largely attempted to explain this phenomenon via mating preferences and strategies. Here, we test one of the most popular evolutionary hypotheses for beauty-enhancing behaviors, drawn from m...
The aim of the current paper was to present important factors for keeping the basic structures of a person’s brain function, i.e., the grey and white matter, intact. Several lines of evidence have shown that motion, relation, and passion are central factors for preserving the neural system in the grey and white matter during ageing. An active lifes...
Following the advances in modern head-mounted displays, research exploring the human
experience of virtual environments has seen a surge in interest. Researchers have examined how
to promote individuals’ sense of presence, i.e., their experience of “being” in the VE, as well as to
diminish the negative side effects of cybersickness. Studies investi...
The principal aim of the present study was to investigate whether passion, grit and mindset differ between distinct levels of football competence in two football teams-elite and junior teams. We compared the 30% highest scoring (HFC) and the 30% lowest scoring groups (LFC) of football competence using the trainer's rankings among two teams from wes...
Virtual reality (VR) is a developing technology that has recently attracted the attention of healthcare practitioners. Recently, VR systems have been used to treat pain symptoms. The present study aims to evaluate the VR effectiveness on chronic pain management. A systematic literature search was performed following the Preferred Reporting Items fo...
The main goal of the study was to explore the relationship between passion, grit and mindset in a group of football players in Norway. The sample had 49 participants. In two different groups in relation to age and level. Sogndal elite team (N = 22) (Elite) and Sogndal Junior team (N = 27) (Junior). To assess the level of passion the passion scale w...
Our study investigated what factors contribute to the perceived usability of Virtual Reality technology by small firms operating in a conservative industry. For this purpose, we interviewed the developers and users of a newly developed Virtual Reality-equipped heavy machinery. We conducted eleven semi-structured interviews and used thematic analysi...
The association between personality and individual tendency for adopting and optimally interfacing with new technologies has often been proposed in the literature. However, only few published studies report experimental data. This study aims to provide evidence on the association between several individual variables and usability experience in mode...
Sense of presence has been often explored in the context of virtual reality (VR) and immersive visual technologies; however, standardized and objective measures of the sense of presence have been difficult to find. Studies attempting to find physiological correlates of sense presence using electroencephalography (EEG) have reported mixed results. I...
Some lines of evidence have shown that sensory input, especially related to vestibular and somatosensory stimulation, may reduce the symptoms related to simulator sickness and increase the sense of presence in VR. The present study aims at understanding how mechanical vibration and auditory stimulation can be used to improve user experience in the...
The fast-phased adoption of modern immersive visual technologies in many fields calls for an assessment of potential costs and
benefits from the point of view of human health. Humans often
reported feelings of discomfort in the experience of virtual reality (VR), however, it is still not known what may promote this
uncomfortable symptomatology. In...
Many studies have attempted to understand which individual differences may be related to the symptoms of discomfort during the virtual experience (simulator sickness) and the generally considered positive sense of being inside the simulated scene (sense of presence). Nevertheless, a very limited number of studies have employed modern consumer-orien...
Virtual reality (VR) is currently being used for a wide range of applications. However, a sense of discomfort during VR experiences (commonly referred to as simulator sickness), is an obstacle for acceptance of the technology outside the niche of tech enthusiasts. Some lines of evidence have shown that sensory input, especially related to vestibula...
Many studies have attempted to understand which individual differences may be related to the symptoms of discomfort during the virtual experience (simulator sickness) and the generally considered positive sense of being inside the simulated scene (sense of presence). Nevertheless, due to the quick technological advancement in the field of virtual r...
The human frontal cortex is asymmetrically involved in motivational and affective processing. Several studies have shown that the left-frontal hemisphere is related to positive and approach-related affect, whereas the right-frontal hemisphere is related to negative and withdrawal-related affect. The present study aimed to investigate whether evolut...
Modern head-mounted displays (HMDs) are a promising technology. Thanks to their affordable cost and versatility, HMDs are gaining attention from different sectors. However, the experience reported by the users of these technologies is sometimes negative. A number of people, when using an HMD, complain of various types of physical discomfort as well...
Virtual reality (VR) offers novel ways to develop skills and learning. This technology can be used to enhance the way we educate and train professionals by possibly being more effective, cost-efficient, and reducing training-related risks. However, the potential benefits from virtual training assume that the trained skills can be transferred to the...
Addressing the challenges related to the safety of the work routines is one of the top priorities for any modern industry, and constant investments are explicitly tailored to reduce work-related risks and to train employees to follow safety procedures. Technological progress and the widespread adoption of immersive visual technologies are nowadays...
The published literature has produced several definitions for the sense of presence in a simulated environment, as well as various methods for measuring it. The variety of conceptualizations makes it difficult for researchers to interpret, compare, and evaluate the presence ratings obtained from individual studies. Presence has been measured by emp...
The neural and perceptual mechanisms that support the efficient visual detection of snakes in humans are still not fully understood. According to the Snake Detection Theory, selection pressures posed by snakes on early primates have shaped the development of the visual system. Previous studies in humans have investigated early visual electrophysiol...
Environmental psychology has provided evidence for psychologically favorable effects of exposure to natural settings, by means of controlled laboratory experiments as well as outdoor field studies. Most of these studies have employed subjective rating scales to assess processes and outcomes of exposure to nature, while only few of them have used ph...
A crucial view in the graded vs. dichotomous debate on visual awareness proposes that its graded or dichotomous nature may depend on the depth of stimulus processing (or level of processing) associated to the experimental task. In the present study, we explored the behavioral patterns and neural correlates of different degrees of awareness associat...
The snake detection hypothesis claims that predatory pressure from snakes has shaped the primate visual system, but we still know very little about how the brain processes evolutionarily important visual cues, and which factors are crucial for quick detection of snakes. We investigated how visual features modulate the electrophysiological markers o...
Continuous flash suppression (CFS) has become a popular tool for studying unconscious processing, but the level at which unconscious processing of visual stimuli occurs under CFS is not clear. Response priming is a robust and well-understood phenomenon, in which the prime stimulus facilitates overt responses to targets if the prime and target are a...
Clinical data and behavioral studies using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) suggest right-hemisphere dominance for top-down modulation of visual processing in humans. We used concurrent TMS-EEG to directly test for hemispheric differences in causal influences of the right and left intraparietal cortex on visual event-related potentials (ERPs...
Deception detection studies have become a trending topic over the past 34 years. Lie detection seems to have moral, ethical, methodological, clinical, and legal implications. Although researchers have studied the P300 (P3) Event-Related Potential (ERP) component towards an understanding of the phenomenon extensively, deception remains a well-hidden...
Detecting the presence of an object is a different process than identifying the object as a particular object. This difference has not been taken into account in designing experiments on the neural correlates of consciousness. We compared the electrophysiological correlates of conscious detection and identification directly by measuring ERPs while...
Snakes are probably the best example of evolutionarily life-threatening stimulus as they have
been one of the first predators of primates and mammals in general. In recent years, it has been
shown that snake images produce specific behavioral and electrophysiological reactions in
humans, provoking enhanced brain activity over the occipital cortex c...
Studies on the neural basis of visual awareness, the subjective experience of seeing, have found several potential neural correlates of visual awareness. Some of them may not directly correlate with awareness but with post-perceptual processes, such as reporting one's awareness of the stimulus. We dissociated potential electrophysiological correlat...
To approach the questions as to why migraine appears to be associated with functional somatic syndromes (FSSs) and whether central sensitization may be an underlying mechanism, the present study investigated (i) comorbidity with diagnoses of three FSSs, three psychiatric disorders and three inflammatory diseases, (ii) degree of mental health proble...
Many event-related potential (ERP) studies have tried to find out which brain processes are responsible for the subjective experience of seeing. The contribution of these studies has been crucial in order to identify the temporal and spatial dynamics of visual awareness. The negative difference wave named visual awareness negativity (VAN), observed...
Projects
Projects (5)
Understanding the psychological and behavioural components of human interaction with modern visualisation technologies as virtual reality.
ImmerSAFE is a four year (2018-2022) H2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network that brings together 9 beneficiaries and 5 partner organizations from Finland, Sweden, Norway, Croatia, Italy, and Switzerland, with the aim of training a new generation of multi-disciplinary experts, who have an understanding of the core imaging technologies, the requirements set to them by the safety-critical applications and who can account for the human user in the design of such systems.
