Abstract
Background
This research utilizes Virtual Reality as a non-conventional, informal educational setting to measure the impact of presence on human working memory performance. Many researchers have assessed human working memory and working memory performance (WMP) by computerizing a task and calculating the participant’s score.
Objective
In this work, we investigate the impact of the degree of presence on working memory performance. First, we evaluate the user’s feeling of being in the environment (i.e., presence), and then we investigate the correlation between WMP and presence.
Method
Participants experienced three presence levels (desktop VR (DVR), immersive VR (IVR), and immersive embodied VR (IEVR)) and conducted the same working memory task (N back task) in each environment.
Result
Our results show that the presence level significantly affects participants’ mean scores. Likewise, it has a significant impact on the participant response time. Hence, the participant score increases as the presence level increases, and the response time decreases as the feeling of presence increases.
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Lusta, M., Seals, C., Teubner-Rhodes, S., Akula, S.C., Richardson, A. (2023). Using Virtual Reality to Evaluate the Effect of the Degree of Presence on Human Working Memory Performance. In: Harris, D., Li, WC. (eds) Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics. HCII 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14017. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35392-5_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35392-5_9
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