Neurophysiological and Perceptual Responses to Real and Virtual Environments
Thursday, May 7, 2026
3:00 PM-5:00 PM
BIOMED PhD Research Proposal
Title:
Neurophysiological and Perceptual Responses to Real and Virtual Environments: A Multimodal Neuroergonomic Study of Brain-Body-Environment Interaction
Speaker:
Kevin L. Ramirez-Chavez, PhD Candidate
School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems
Drexel University
Advisor:
Hasan Ayaz, PhD
Professor
School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems
Drexel University
Details:
Environmental neuroscience has established that exposure to natural environments supports cognitive restoration, emotional regulation, and stress recovery. Paradoxically, these benefits are most needed in modern societies characterized by chronic indoor living, pervasive screen exposure, urban density, and rising rates of stress-related mental health disorders, yet the neurobiological mechanisms through which everyday environments shape brain–body functioning remain poorly understood. Much of the existing evidence derives from laboratory paradigms that strip away environmental complexity, thereby limiting ecological validity and obscuring the dynamic neural and autonomic processes that govern how humans experience and navigate real-world settings. This dissertation addresses this gap by implementing a multimodal neuroergonomic framework that integrates mobile functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to capture task- and environment-evoked cortical dynamics, wrist-worn sensors to quantify autonomic nervous system activity through electrodermal activity (EDA) and optical cardiac metrics used to derive heart-rate variability (HRV), and validated self- report questionnaires to assess perceived restoration, affect, and environmental aesthetic. Together, these measures provide a comprehensive, multilevel characterization of neural, physiological, and experiential responses to natural environments during both passive immersion and active navigation in real-world (RW) and immersive virtual reality (VR) contexts. Grounded in Attention Restoration and Stress Recovery theories, the central hypothesis is that restorative and navigational processes manifest as coordinated brain–body signatures spanning prefrontal cortical dynamics, autonomic regulation, and subjective experience, and that VR will reproduce core, but incomplete, features of these RW patterns.
First, this work identifies neural and autonomic signatures of cognitive restoration during RW resting-state immersion in natural environments by integrating mobile fNIRS measures of prefrontal cortex hemodynamics, autonomic indices derived from HRV and EDA, and self-reported experiences of beauty and restoration. Authentic nature exposure is hypothesized to yield prefrontal activation patterns indicative of reduced cognitive load, increased HRV, decreased EDA, and strong convergence between neural and experiential restoration indices, thereby operationalizing restoration as a multimodal construct rather than a solely subjective state. Second, the evaluation of the fidelity of immersive VR as a surrogate for RW nature by testing whether matched virtual environments reproduce corresponding cortical and autonomic signatures and by examining perceived restoration and naturalness as mediators of these effects, directly assessing the capacity of technologically mediated environments to evoke restorative brain–body states. Third, the research extends from passive immersion to dynamic, goal-directed behavior by modeling how RW navigation through natural environments engages coupled neural, autonomic, and behavioral processes that support spatial cognition, executive control, and affective engagement. During path-planning tasks, task-evoked prefrontal activation is analyzed alongside HRV and EDA to characterize how cognitive workload and emotional regulation co-evolve in naturalistic settings, with the hypothesis that natural environments promote adaptive autonomic regulation even under elevated executive demand. Finally, this work tests whether VR-based navigation constitutes a valid translational model of RW path-planning by comparing neural, autonomic, and behavioral signatures across matched immersive VR and RW tasks, predicting preserved executive control dynamics but attenuated autonomic–affective coupling in VR due to diminished multisensory and embodied engagement.
Together, these integrated investigations establish a unified neuroergonomic framework for understanding how the brain and body jointly support restoration, engagement, and navigation across real and virtual natural environments. By combining mobile neuroimaging, wearable physiology, behavioral, and experiential data in ecologically valid contexts, this dissertation provides foundational evidence for how environmental design and immersive technologies can be leveraged to promote cognitive restoration, stress recovery, and well-being, while advancing methodological approaches for studying human behavior in the environments where it naturally unfolds.
Contact Information
Natalia Broz
njb33@drexel.edu