High immersion in virtual reality is often hypothesized to improve learning and memory. This immersion benefit is frequently attributed to presence, the user’s feeling of being present inside the computer-generated environment. Obtaining learning gains due to high immersion may however be difficult, as is evidenced by the null results of multiple studies in this area. In the current study we investigated the role of presence in low- and high-immersion virtual reality settings. No differences in performance in object location and spatial memory were found between low- and high-immersive conditions. Yet, when considering self-report measures of presence, performance improvements in the high immersive condition did become apparent. The finding of the importance to consider the role of presence in virtual reality highlights the complexity of immersion effects in simulated environments

A large body of research in the cognitive sciences relies on examining statistical differences. While the approach of examining differences can aid in explaining behavior, it does not necessarily mean that these differences have predictive power. Yet, understanding behavior both involves explaining and predicting behavior. As a point in case, the current study used a naturalistic email dataset to examine statistical differences and predictive power in fraudulent activities. Differences between 1st and 3rd person pronoun use in liars and people telling the truth are widely reported in the literature. The current study aimed to test for the effect of fraudulent events on pronoun use in emails using the Enron corpus and additionally applied a machine learning approach to estimate whether pronoun use predicts fraud. While the ratio between 1st and 3rd person pronoun use was related to fraud, this construct did not have predictive power. The current study highlights an important conclusion for the cognitive sciences: The importance of not only testing for differences, but of also applying predictive models. In this way it can be determined whether effects of a construct on an outcome can also predict the outcome.

Immersive virtual reality (VR) offers important benefits over non-immersive displays, such as increased ecological validity and high experimental control. Studies in cognitive science using immersive VR are however still rather limited in number. The current paper illustrates the opportunities to apply VR in the cognitive sciences by using an immersive adaptation of a classic study by Godden and Baddeley (1975) on environmental context-dependent memory (ECDM). In this memory study, retrieval was facilitated when the context between learning and testing matched. In line with the literature showing small effects for context-dependent recall, the current study indicated a marginally significant ECDM effect for one virtual context, but when deep processing was controlled, a significant ECDM effect was obtained. In demonstrating the applicability and benefits of immersive VR, this study at last opens a doorway to the large-scale implementation of immersive VR for the cognitive sciences.