Department of Psychology, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
Memory. 2021 Sep;29(8):983-1005. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2021.1953535. Epub 2021 Jul 22.
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 (i.e., the objective degree to which VR naturalistically portrays a real-world environment) and (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.
虽然虚拟现实 (VR) 是一种很有前途的心理研究工具，但对于 VR 环境的哪些特性会影响情景记忆，我们仍知之甚少。VR 有两个密切相关的特性：（即 VR 逼真地描绘现实世界环境的客观程度）和（即主观上感觉自己“精神上被传送到”虚拟世界的程度）。虽然一些研究表明，沉浸感的增加对基于 VR 的学习有益，但这种益处是否广泛而一致地扩展到沉浸感的各个组成部分还不确定。此外，尚不清楚存在感是否会中介沉浸感对记忆的影响。三项实验评估了存在感和记忆是如何受到沉浸感的三种操作的影响的：视野、单模态（仅视觉）与双模态（视听）环境以及灯光效果的逼真度（例如，阴影的出现或缺失）。结果表明，不同沉浸感操作的影响是不均匀的，在某些情况下会影响记忆，而在其他情况下会影响存在感，但不一定两者都有。重要的是，在这些实验中的任何一个实验中，以及在跨实验的综合分析中，都没有出现存在感的中介效应的证据。这一结果表明，在影响情景记忆表现方面，沉浸感和存在感之间存在一定程度的独立性。
