It is said that pirates made their victims walk the plank over the side of their ship. Biopsychologists from Bochum, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Wellington made the same for science. Well, sort of. The aim was to study the neural fundaments of fear. This is usually done by showing pictures with highly negative content, but the effects are often shallow. To improve ecological validity, the scientists now asked the participants to wear virtual reality (VR) systems while walking a real plank. Looking down, they saw that the plank went over the side of an 80 storeys skyscraper. That induced true fear. And indeed, walking the plank induced a higher right hemispheric activation, as expected for fear, than looking at negative pictures. Thus, testing participants under more ecological conditions can uncover mechanisms of the emotional brain.

El Basbasse, Y., Packheiser, J., Peterburs, J., Maymond, C., Güntürkün, O., Grimshaw, G., Ocklenburg, S., Walk the Plank! Using mobile EEG to investigate emotional lateralization of immersive fear in virtual reality, Royal Society Open Science, 2023, 10: 221239.