ABSTRACT

Although virtual reality (VR) represents a promising tool for psychological research, much remains unknown about how properties of VR environments affect episodic memory. Two closely related characteristics of VR are immersion (i.e., the objective degree to which VR naturalistically portrays a real-world environment) and presence (i.e., the subjective sense of being “mentally transported” to the virtual world). Although some research has demonstrated benefits of increased immersion on VR-based learning, it is uncertain how broadly and consistently this benefit extends to individual components of immersion. Moreover, it is unclear whether presence may mediate the effect of immersion on memory. Three experiments assessed how presence and memory were affected by three manipulations of immersion: field of view, unimodal (visual only) vs. bimodal (audiovisual) environments, and the realism of lighting effects (e.g., the occurrence or absence of shadows). Results indicated that effects of different manipulations of immersion are heterogeneous, affecting memory in some instances and presence in others, but not necessarily both. Importantly, no evidence for a mediating effect of presence emerged in any of these experiments, nor in a combined cross-experimental analysis. This outcome demonstrates a degree of independence between immersion and presence with regard to their influence on episodic memory performance.

摘要

尽管虚拟现实 (VR) 是一种很有前途的心理学研究工具，但关于 VR 环境的特性如何影响情景记忆，仍有很多未知。VR 的两个密切相关的特征是沉浸感（即 VR 自然地描绘现实世界环境的客观程度）和临场感（即被“精神传送”到虚拟世界的主观感觉）。尽管一些研究已经证明增加沉浸感对基于 VR 的学习有好处，但不确定这种好处在多大程度上和持续地扩展到沉浸感的各个组成部分。此外，尚不清楚存在是否会介导沉浸对记忆的影响。三项实验评估了三种沉浸式操作如何影响存在和记忆：视野、单峰（仅视觉）与双峰（视听）环境以及照明效果的真实性（例如，阴影的出现与否）。结果表明，沉浸的不同操作的效果是异质的，在某些情况下影响记忆，在其他情况下影响存在，但不一定两者兼而有之。重要的，在任何这些实验中都没有出现存在中介效应的证据，也没有在综合交叉实验分析中出现。这一结果表明沉浸和存在之间在它们对情景记忆表现的影响方面具有一定程度的独立性。