Abstract
Virtual reality immerses individuals in 3D environments where spatial properties are similar to those of real life. Virtual reality can therefore be effective and relevant in the study of memory processing, especially when spatial properties are involved. We studied the effect of a 20-minute rest period on memory performance for associative and relational learnings. Eighty-one participants were placed in a virtual environment in which they learned 24 associations implicating objects and their respective precise location. As expected, the performance of associative memory was improved by a rest period between study and test phases. We discuss these results and the benefits of using an immersive virtual environment for such memory investigation. In addition, elaborating our environment was highly informative and led to several recommendations that we believe could be useful for researchers who would like to rely on virtual reality for investigating memory.
Highlights
When human beings evolve in a 3D world, most of their experiences are spatialized
Our study aims at evaluating the effect of a 20-minute rest period with a nap, on the memory performance for associated and related items, using an associative inference task in Virtual reality (VR)
Aims and hypothese The present study aims at evaluating the effect of a short rest period on associative and relational performance on a memory task proposed in virtual reality
Summary
When human beings evolve in a 3D world, most of their experiences are spatialized. Being able to encode, store and retrieve the spatial properties of what we experienced is important for adaptability to our environment and is a key feature of episodic memory. Sleep improves performance for both the associative and relational properties of memory (Rasch & Born, 2013). When the spatial properties of an episode are reactivated in the hippocampus, these reactivations are supposed to contribute to the consolidation of the whole memory (Talamini et al, 2008) This associative and relational improvement has been studied over periods ranging from twenty minutes of offline delay (delay without rehearsal) to several days with a typical sleep-wake cycle (Ellenbogen et al, 2007). Memory improvement for associative and relational performance has not yet been demonstrated for a period of 20-minutes or less using VR design. Our study aims at evaluating the effect of a 20-minute rest period with a nap, on the memory performance for associated and related items ( referred as object in this study), using an associative inference task in VR
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