Cognitive tasks in VR - done but go over

Theory of mind (ToM) (Baron-cohen)

• ability to understand others’ mental states

• Sally Anne false beleif task

• Identification of non-verbal behaviours 

  • attribution of social behaviours are issue in autism

Heider & Simmel (1944)

• different geometric shapes moving around

• demonstrated the human tendency to attribute human-like intentions, emotions, and narratives to simple moving geometric shapes

Animacy

• ability to attribute human characteristics & mental states to shapes

Abel et al (2000) & White et al (2011)

• Theory of mind (coxing, mocking)

• Random (star, drifting)

• Gold directed (chasing, leading)

Animacy perception in VR (Savickaite et al 2021)

• created 2D animations & 3D animations

• followed the animations → random, chase, dance

• used autsitms coefficent

Animacy perception in VR (Savickaite et al 2021) Procedure

• No interaction

  • no obvious interaction between the triangles, and movement appears random.

• Physical interaction

  • An interaction between the triangles in which actions are directed toward each other in order to achieve specific goals.

• Mental interaction

  • An interaction between the triangles involving the manipulation of the emotions and thoughts of one triangle by the other

Animacy perception in VR (Savickaite et al 2021) findings

• inaccurate interpretations of animation

• difficulty deciding on interactions on whether they are mental or physical

• very immersive so improves on ecological validity 

Visual search in 3D

• locating a target within clutter

• used in everyday & highstake tasks

• influenced by target saliency, task relevant and cognitive traits

VR & visual search task (Savickaite & Parker, 2025)

• Visual search task in three conditions: 

  • 2D desktop,  2D displayed in VR, 3D VR

• VR offers immersion & controlled enviroments 

• 20 trials

• Select a target shape among distractors

• Order counterbalanced

• Measures: accuracy & completion time

results of VR & visual search task

• 2D = easiest, most efficient, highest accuracy

• VR3D = most cognitively demanding

  • Engages visuospatial memory strongly

  • Requires navigation + attention

  • quickest completion

• VR2D = intermediate demands

• significant differences between groups

key points of cognitive task in VR

• Performance declines as tasks become more immersive

• VR3D introduces greater variability in behaviour

• RT differ significantly across conditions

• Accuracy differences trend toward significance

• Immersive VR likely reflects true real-world search complexity better than 2D tasks

• Cognitive load, spatial memory, & attentional allocation differ between modalities

Immersion affects multiple things

• increases cognitive load

• reduce VWM efficiency

• Increase predictor error

• flatterns priors

predicitive processing language

describing cognition in terms of the brain as a prediction machine, using terms like priors (expectations), sensory evidence, prediction error (mismatch between expected and actual input), and precision (how much weight a signal gets), instead of just saying “expectations”, “surprise”, “attention”, and “learning”.