Previous research regarding the potential benefits of exposing individuals to surrogate nature (photographs and videos) has found that such immersion results in restorative effects such as increased positive affect, decreased negative affect, and decreased stress. In the current experiment, we examined whether immersion in a virtual computer-generated nature setting could produce restorative effects. Twenty-two participants were equally divided between two conditions, while controlling for gender. In each condition, participants performed a stress-induction task, and were then immersed in virtual reality (VR) for 10 minutes. The control condition featured a slide show in VR, and the nature experimental condition featured an active exploration of a virtual forest. Participants in the nature condition were found to exhibit increased positive affect and decreased stress after immersion in VR when compared to those in the control condition. The results suggest that immersion in virtual nature settings has similar beneficial effects as exposure to surrogate nature. These results also suggest that VR can be used as a tool to study and understand restorative effects.

We develop and assess an auditory version of an increasingly widely used measure of sustained attention, the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART). In two separate studies, the auditory SART generated slower response times and fewer errors than the visual SART. Proportion of errors, response times, and response time variability were, however, significantly and strongly correlated across the two modalities. The cross-modality correlations were generally equivalent to split-half correlations within modalities, indicating a strong agreement of the assessment of individual differences in sustained attention in the visual and auditory modalities. The foregoing results plus the finding that errors on the auditory SART were reduced suggests that the auditory SART may be a preferred alternative for use with populations with deficits in sustained attention.

Near misses and losses disguised as wins have been of interest to gambling researchers and policymakers for many years (e.g., Griffiths in J Gambl Stud 9(2):101–120, 1993). This systematic literature review describes the behavioural, psychological, and psychobiological effects of near misses and losses disguised as wins (LDWs) in an effort to evaluate their precise influence on the player and to highlight areas requiring further investigation. A systematic search for relevant studies was conducted using Scopus, PubMed, PsycINFO, ProQuest Sociology databases, and the Gambling Research Exchange Ontario Knowledge Repository. A total of 51 (from an initial pool of 802) experimental peer-reviewed studies using human participants were found between 1991 and 2015. The systematic review revealed that near misses motivate continued play, but have varying effects on the emotional state or betting behaviour of the player. Near miss events were also shown to be associated with elevated skin conductance levels and diffuse activity across the brain, most consistently in areas processing reinforcement and reward. Re-examination of the studies of near misses events after classifying the type of game feedback suggested that the effectiveness of near misses is related to the phenomenology of a near miss itself rather than as a response to auditory or visual feedback provided by a slot machine. In contrast to near misses, the presence of LDWs was found to relate to an overestimation of how much a player is actually winning and was consistently viewed as an exciting event. The effect of LDWs appears to be driven by the presence of visuals and sounds most often associated with a true win. Practical implications and directions for future research are also discussed.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10899-017-9688-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Previous research has suggested that the layout of urban spaces can have a substantial influence on how people navigate through those spaces. However, to date, few studies have directly investigated how changes in layout interact with changes in visual field to shape a person's route choice. Across two experiments, the influence of visual field and spatial layout was manipulated using virtual reality. It was found that route choice was significantly influenced by the configuration of a space-The more consistently organized environment led to more systematic route choices. However, limiting the perception of distant visual information was found to influence route choice in a similar but completely independent way. These findings suggest that navigation in urban spaces is dependent on the interaction between topology and the visual features of the space, where greater visual field and a consistently organized spatial layout lead to maximally efficient route choices.

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