Study creates 'time travel' illusion

Virtual reality can be used to give the illusion of going "back in time", according to an exploratory study.

In this virtual world, subjects were able to reduce how many people a gunman killed, an event they had unknowingly been part of.
Going into "the past" increased the level of guilt the participants felt.
Writing in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, the team says that virtual time travel could help people overcome traumatic experiences.
Most interesting, the researchers add, was the emotional impact virtual time travel had on the participants.
"The more the participants felt the illusion, the greater the sense of their own morality," explained co-author Mel Slater of the ICREA (Catalan Research Institute) and University College London.
Mutable past In the virtual world, participants could walk, talk and move similar to how they would in real life, and previous studies have shown that people strongly associate with their virtual selves.
"In virtual reality, the brain's low level perceptual system does not distinguish between the virtual and the real world; the brain takes what it sees and hears in a surrounding environment as given," added Prof Slater.
"Therefore, if they had an experience with the illusion of time travel, there is implicit learning that the past is mutable, that is: 'my own past decisions don't matter because they're changeable'-."READ MORE