Psych Weekly Update: VR, what is it good for?
This week, we discuss highlights from a review paper that spans a 30-year period offering five major impacts of VR on the field of psychology.
I have a strong interest in this topic as someone who has conducted studies on VR and human performance. I am also a huge fan of the book Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (2011) where much of the action takes place in a VR future, so I was excited when I saw this paper!
With over 25-million VR sets in use across the world this topic seems more important than ever. Despite much of the research world refraining from using VR tasks, there has been a sharp rise in VR scholarship within the past decade.
Below are brief takeaways from the paper: Five canonical findings from 30 years of psychological experimentation in virtual reality, a review by Jeremy Bailenson and colleagues appearing in Nature Human Behavior. The authors included studies with: (1) stable effect sizes in meta-analyses, and (2) findings that scholars in the field believe to be stable and consistent.
Figure: Wikimedia Commons by SimonWaldherr (with Midjourney and Photoshop)
FINDING #1: The benefit of VR depends on the activity
This might appear to be obvious, but the article drives home the point that we don’t always need the immersion of VR for an activity to be successful. VR’s immersiveness helps when we engage in training on specific activities, especially those that involve complex visuals, or interacting with other people. While not a complete substitute for face-to-face interactions, you can feel your brain’s personal distance-related circuits starting to engage when approaching a realistic avatar in virtual space.
The authors mention the domains of medicine and military activity as promising use cases for VR training. I agree completely. I think of the excellent work of Skip Rizzo and his colleagues at USC. Skip has led efforts to build many virtual tools that allow people to simulate psychiatric counseling sessions with VR therapists, or VR clients. My colleague Marge Zielke at UT Dallas has created highly immersive practice sessions for pre-med students to learn how to interact with patients and better diagnose them. These efforts could help to make mental health counseling better and more accessible, while also improving the all-important bedside manner of future doctors.
At times we simply don’t need the full presence of VR to learn effectively. For example, smartphone use tells us that many people would rather look at digital input on a tiny screen, even when there is a bright busy world of real individuals right in front of them (it never ceases to amaze me). So, VR may be overkill for some tasks depending on the goals and context.
FINDING #2: VR avatars can influence our behavior
Bailenson and colleagues describe the Proteus effect, where someone’s behavior morphs to fit with the altered appearance of their avatar. For example, participants may negotiate with greater confidence the taller their avatar appears. I’ve experienced this feeling when playing a video game avatar with a different gender or ethnicity than myself. Through the lens of an altered self you can view your identity and your actions differently. This has always been one of startling and powerful features of VR.
Avatars can also facilitate a key skill called perspective-taking, our ability to read the thoughts of others based on expressions and body language. The authors note that this finding has been controversial and may depend on specific circumstances limiting its ability to generalize. That makes sense to me. People vary in empathy and, while it can be trained, some are just more socially in tune than others.
My colleagues and I had conducted a study on the platform Second Life back in the 2010s at a time when facial expressions were not realistic in the VR environment. Despite the lack of facial cues, our participants improved at judging others’ emotions after training.
FINDING #3: Training on procedures is more effective than training on abstract learning
This fits with Finding #1 above. There are clear cases where training in VR can enhance abilities to a greater degree. These include improved spatial knowledge, learning by direct experience, and learning through collaborations. These advantages map onto many of the benefits that we get from learning in our native context, the real world. Enjoyment and motivation can also increase in VR. Positive findings indeed.
On the flipside, VR can lead to cognitive overload. This makes sense too. Just as any complex environment leads us toward distraction and missed opportunities, so it goes in virtual spaces as well.
This hits home for me when I reminisce about my days in high school . I can remember a lot more of the teenage silliness that took place in some of my classes than I remember the actual material we were meant to learn. Similarly, complex VR environments can also detract from learning specific skills, while enhancing others. So, VR may never be a “one-size-fits all” solution for learning.
FINDING #4: Body tracking makes VR unique
Quality VR interactions depend upon representing the user’s body is space on a moment-by-moment basis. This makes sense when you consider how engaging the experience of VR can be when your virtual hands respond in unison with your physical movements.
This aspect reminds me of how much I enjoyed the boxing simulation on the Quest 2. The view of my avatar’s gloved hands pummeling the virtual opponent made it feel as if I was really in the ring as I burned very real calories!
This finding also reminds me of the limitations of the classic arcade game Dragon’s Lair from the 1980s. This was one of the early laser-disk games and was a short-lived sensation due to its glorious cartoon graphics. I always found the game maddeningly difficult to play as the interaction with the player came through simplistic joystick movements that had to be timed just right. The movements of the in-game hero were so far removed from the player’s actions that the game always left me confused. Playing the game felt much more like passively watching cool graphics, than actually driving action through an avatar.
Obviously, things have come a long way in the past 40 years! The sophisticated programming of a today’s VR simulations enable a remarkably rich dataset detailing user movements, locomotion properties, social distances, and interactions. They track so much data that it can be hard to make sense of it. Bailenson and colleagues point out the challenges with these rich data for user privacy. This can be a serious concern for commercial VR uses now and in the future.
FINDING #5: People underestimate distance in VR
Our visual systems actively create and update representations of our environment as we move about our lives. Our brains constantly factor in cues including relative size, position, shadows, and sharpness. The result is the virtual simulation that we carry around in our heads throughout our waking lives. We can glimpse brief “glitches in The Matrix” of our brains in the form of visual illusions.
Just as in real life, the authors point out that VR leads to illusions too. VR often fails to include shadows, or other critical details that we observe in the real world. Those details matter and without them users tend to underestimate distance in VR spaces leading to challenges with judging physical movements. The gaps between VR and real spaces can limit acquiring skills that that depend on spatial perception. No matter how close VR gets, it isn’t the real thing.
PARTING THOUGHTS:
This article pointed out some of the excellent strengths of VR including engaging our social brains, replicating the benefits of collaboration, and enabling simulations of complex tasks. The use-cases for VR training include those tasks that are difficult, or impractical to simulate in the real world such as medical procedures and multi-person military operations. This suggests to me that team-building exercises are a high potential use for VR that is relatively untapped at the moment.
It's good to know that VR has these potential strengths. As developers continue to advance the technology, we should start to see more effective training tools become more accessible, affordable, and attractive to more users.
It’s also helpful to keep in mind some of the limitations of VR including the limited physics, the visual complexity, and the potential for user judgment errors that limit real-world training effectiveness. The article highlights just how difficult it is to replicate the physics of the real world in virtual space.
Lastly, I’ve noticed that VR fatigue can set in after engaging in virtual space for extended periods of time. I always feel like rejoining the real world after about 20 to 30 minutes even in highly motivating virtual environments.
Thank you for your time and attention. I’ll talk to you again next week.
“That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it's also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real."
-James Haliday, VR developer extraordinaire in the book Ready Player One
REFERENCES
Bailenson, J. N., DeVeaux, C., Han, E., Markowitz, D. M., Santoso, M., & Wang, P. (2025). Five canonical findings from 30 years of psychological experimentation in virtual reality. Nature Human Behaviour, 1-11.