The Effect of Increased Immersion and its Relationship with Presence on Episodic Memory Performance within Virtual Reality Environments

Although virtual reality (VR) represents a promising tool for psychological research, much remains unknown about how different properties of VR environments may affect episodic memory performance. Two closely related characteristics of VR are immersion (i.e., the objective degree to which VR naturalistically portrays a facsimile of an analogous real-world environment) and presence (i.e., the subjective sense of being “mentally transported” to the virtual world). While some research has demonstrated a benefit of increased immersion on VR-based learning, it is uncertain how broadly and consistently this benefit might extend to individual components of immersion in isolation. Additionally, it is unclear whether immersion itself is what influences memory performance in these instances, or if presence is a mediating factor which explains the relationship between immersion and memory. To address these issues, the current study assessed how presence and memory were affected by three individual manipulations of immersion: field of view, unimodal (visual only) vs. bimodal (visual and auditory) environments, and the realism of lighting effects (e.g., the occurrence or absence of shadows). Results varied between different manipulations of immersion, suggesting that outcomes of one property of immersion may not be representative of immersion in general. However, no evidence for a mediating effect of presence emerged in any of the individual experiments, nor in a combined inter-experimental analysis. This outcome demonstrates a degree of independence between immersion and presence with regard to their influence on episodic memory performance, and further implies that presence may not be a critical factor in memory in VR.Doctor of Philosoph