Kinesiology PhD candidates and members of the Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory (APAL) Chris Curry and Nicollete Peterson, published work in Frontiers in Virtual Reality along with Ruixuan Li, PhD, a former lab member, and Thomas Stoffregen, PhD, professor and director of APAL.

The article published, “Postural Activity During Use of a Head-Mounted Display: Sex Differences in the “Driver–Passenger” Effect,” expands on previous research documenting reliable sex differences in experiencing motion sickness, as well as reliable differences between participants in control of a virtual vehicle and participants who are not. The study asked whether postural precursors of motion sickness would simultaneously be influenced by individual and situational factors. The results are consistent with a prediction of the postural instability theory of motion sickness etiology and shed new light on the multifactorial origins of postural precursors of motion sickness in virtual environments.

Dr. Li was a member of APAL during her PhD program at the U of M, she received her PhD in Human Factors in 2018. Curry was supported by an NSF grant for translational sensory science (NRT-1734815). Dr. Stoffregen was supported by NSF-1901423, “Prediction, early detection, and mitigation of virtual reality simulator sickness.”