EDUCATIONAL CENTRES DESIGN TOOLS. VIRTUAL REALITY FOR THE STUDY OF ATTENTION AND MEMORY PERFORMANCE

The space that surrounds us, be it natural or constructed, induces varied reactions in human beings. This implies a myriad of effects, which also involve teaching spaces. Therefore, studying the effect of the design of these spaces from an empirical perspective is fundamental. To this end, the execution of tasks in physical spaces is often used. However, this form of research has the limitation of the (temporal, economic, and environmental) cost of executing different modifications in the space. Virtual reality shown through head-mounted displays (HMD) allows to address this limitation by producing realistic environmental simulations that generate the sensation of "being there". However, its validity in this kind of studies needs to be analysed. Specifically, this was the objective of the present study: to validate virtual reality in HMD in the specific case of the study of cognitive abilities in educational centres. To do so, a field study was carried out to compare responses related to attention and memory, in a physical university classroom and its virtual replica. Psychological tasks were used to quantify these cognitive abilities: attention by the reaction time to auditory stimuli, and memory by the number of words remembered from an auditory list. 40 university students participated, half of them in the virtual scenario and the other half in the virtual scenario. Analyses indicate that the performances in virtual spaces displayed in HMD are comparable to these of physical spaces. Results are of general interest for researchers who use this tool in similar contexts, and derive suggestive implications related to online training.