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Spatial and attentional aftereffects of virtual reality and relations to cybersickness

  • S.I. : VR and Cognitive Science
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Abstract

Cybersickness describes the nausea and discomfort that frequently emerges upon exposure to a virtual reality (VR) environment. The extent to which cybersickness leads to temporary constraints in cognitive functioning after VR exposure is a critical aspect of evaluating the risk to human safety where VR tasks are used for workforce training. Here, we examined whether VR exposure results in deteriorated cognitive spatial ability and attention, and if this possible deterioration is related to cybersickness. A standardized cognitive test battery consisting of Corsi blocks task (CBT), Manikin spatial task (MST), and color trails test (CTT-A and -B) was administered before and after participants were exposed to virtual reality (VR group), or engaged in interactive board games (control group). The performance of participants in CBT remained unchanged from pre-test to post-test in both groups, while performance in MST improved in the control and remained stable in VR group. Response times in CTT-A remained stable in the VR group but reduced significantly in the control group. Regarding CTT-B, participants from both groups became significantly faster in post-test. We did not observe any significant sex differences, or effects of past VR experience, across measures of cognitive performance or cybersickness. Crucially, no significant correlations were found between cognitive performance changes and cybersickness scores in any cases. The results provide encouragement for the use of VR in professional settings, suggesting that VR and cybersickness may minimally limit subsequent cognitive processing. However, it will be crucial to further examine the aftereffects in other cognitive functions.

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Availability of data and material

The data that support the findings of this study are freely available on the Open Science Framework: Varmaghani, S., Abbasi, Z., Weech, S., Rasti, J. (2020). Spatial and attentional aftereffects of virtual reality and relations to cybersickness. Retrieved from https://osf.io/eqdva/

Notes

  1. Models with normally distributed responses that incorporate random effects are called linear mixed-models (LMMs); they are a special case of Generalized LMMs (GLMM). Interestingly, GLMMs allow not only continuous, but also binary and count-dependent variables to be analyzed (McCulloch et al. 2008). Modern mixed models that use a model building approach rather than a hypothesis testing approach, are more flexible than classical analysis of variance (ANOVAs), allowing e.g., non-normal responses, unbalanced experimental designs, and more complex grouping structures. LMMs providing results with acceptable type I error rates (Baayen et al. 2008) and have advantages compared to the classic ANOVA, as they require fewer assumptions to be met.

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Funding

This research was supported by grants to Javad Rasti from University of Isfahan Center of Entertainment Industries (https://uicvgame.ui.ac.ir/). The industry sponsor had no influence in the design or execution of the current research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran

    Sina Varmaghani & Zahra Abbasi

  2. School of Physical and Occupational Therapy, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

    Séamas Weech

  3. Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran

    Javad Rasti

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  1. Sina Varmaghani
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  2. Zahra Abbasi
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  3. Séamas Weech
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  4. Javad Rasti
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Sina Varmaghani and Zahra Abbasi. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Sina Varmaghani and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Javad Rasti.

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Varmaghani, S., Abbasi, Z., Weech, S. et al. Spatial and attentional aftereffects of virtual reality and relations to cybersickness. Virtual Reality 26, 659–668 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-021-00535-0

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