Abstract
Immersive Virtual Reality Technology (IVR) is a visual multi-sensory computer-simulated environment that perceptually surrounds an individual, creating the illusion that one has “stepped inside” and is included in, and interacting with the generated world. Although IVR has been suggested as a tool to enhance learning, existing work has not examined how IVR presentations, compared with other types of storytelling, facilitate or interfere with children’s memory formation. Here, we present data from a study of seventy 6- and 7-year-old children randomly assigned to experience a story in one of three modalities: IVR, video, or a paper-based book. We assessed the children’s story recall and their ability to identify the protagonist’s emotions. Results showed that, overall, children in the IVR condition performed better in the memory-recall task than the children in the video and book conditions. The most pronounced difference in memory performance was between the IVR and book conditions. In the IVR versus video conditions, 6-year-olds performed significantly better in the IVR condition than in the video condition, while 7-year-olds performed similarly in both digital-story conditions. We found no effects of condition on children’s attribution of emotions to the story’s protagonist. We conclude that IVR may enhance children’s ability to learn story content in certain situations.
Highlights
The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of immersive virtual reality (IVR) on children’s memory of a story
Given the various reasons that an IVR experience could either enhance or distract from children’s learning, this study aimed to investigate whether IVR technologies could generate more vivid emotions and increase memory achievement in children
The purpose of this study was to determine whether IVR could increase memory achievement and generate more vivid emotions in children compared with video or hard-copy book modalities
Summary
From a very young age, children are inclined to interact with technology (Hirsh-Pasek et al, 2015; Huber et al, 2018). IVR likewise has the potential to be used as a pedagogical tool and as an immersive space for student learning, providing the learners with an authentic context in which they can develop their scope of learning, visualize situations and concepts that are not possible to display on other mediums, and obtain more meaningful knowledge (Chen, 2016; Huang et al, 2010; Ibáñez et al, 2011). IVR can provide realism to the learning experience, allowing more practical learning and understanding, and thereby resulting in improved levels of cognitive functioning (Papanastasiou et al, 2018)
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