In Experiment, VR Marginally Improves Learning in Minority of Volunteers

3D games and then virtual reality have long been touted as having the potential to be user-friendly "memory palaces" for educators, an ancient means of learning that today's students could easily use:

A variation of the "method of loci" involves creating imaginary locations (houses, palaces, roads, and cities) to which the same procedure is applied. It is accepted that there is a greater cost involved in the initial setup, but thereafter the performance is in line with the standard loci method. The purported advantage is to create towns and cities that each represent a topic or an area of study, thus offering an efficient filing of the information and an easy path for the regular review necessary for long term memory storage.

I've written about studies to see if this speculation is actually true, and now a University of Maryland study has some tentative results:

Both groups received printouts of well-known faces–including Abraham Lincoln, the Dalai Lama, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Marilyn Monroe–and familiarized themselves with the images. Next, the researchers showed the participants the faces using the memory palace format with two imaginary locations: an interior room of an ornate palace and an external view of a medieval town. Both of the study groups navigated each memory palace for five minutes. Desktop participants used a mouse to change their viewpoint, while VR users turned their heads from side to side and looked up and down.

VR did improve memory retention -- but only for a minority of volunteers, and only a little bit:

“Many of the participants said the immersive ‘presence’ while using VR allowed them to focus better. This was reflected in the research results: 40 percent of the participants scored at least 10 percent higher in recall ability using VR over the desktop display,” wrote the researchers.

Emphasis mine. If this was a graded test, in other words, 40% of the class would have improved their letter grade from a B to an A. So from a practical standpoint, educators would need to decide if this improvement in retention for less than half their students was worth significantly changing their curriculum to include VR-based instruction. (A costly proposition for at least the next 5-10 years.)

To be fair, this particular experiment only involved 40 volunteers, so more experiments with larger bodies of volunteers are warranted. Personally, I like most other 3D gamers would probably be in that 40% who learned better through VR -- I can vividly remember the architectural layout of countless games I've played, even from 10-15 years ago -- but as always, the next question is how much of our general education system should we change to better suit the needs of, well, people like me.

Hat tip: Philip Rosedale, who's been talking about virtual worlds and memory palaces since I've known him!

An important finding supporting broader use of VR: Memory improvement for 3D information presented via HMD versus Desktop screen. https://t.co/36mCAtkmUN

— Philip Rosedale (@philiprosedale) June 16, 2018

Comments

[Amanda]

A study of 40 people is almost meaningless. Whoever does a bigger study should also look at long term retention.