MR4ISL: A Mixed Reality System for Psychological Experiments Focused on Social Learning and Social Interactions

Abstract

We present MR4ISL (Mixed Reality for Implicit Social Learning), a HoloLens application designed to examine the psychological aspects involved by implicit social learning, a key process responsible for information acquisition at an unconscious level that influences humans’ behavioral, cognitive, and emotional functioning. We describe the engineering details of MR4ISL, present our roadmap for identifying technical solutions for believable animations of virtual avatars relevant for implicit social learning, and exemplify use cases of MR4ISL that emerged from discussions with three researchers from psychology. To date, MR4ISL is the only tool that uses mixed reality simulations to increase the external validity of psychological research in the study of implicit social learning.