Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Virtual reality environments provide valuable opportunities for cognitive scientists to investigate complex cognitive func-tions in ecologically valid environments. For example, it is unclear if visual representation of the users body is requiredto evoke optimal performance. This study examined the effects of hand representation in a virtual flight simulation usingbehavioural and biometric data. Event-Related Potentials, Event-Related Spectral Perturbations, and mental workload re-sponses were measured using wireless electroencephalography across the hand presence conditions. Workload indices andneural activity in the parietal region was not significantly affected by the presence of hands, yet lower alpha levels werefound across all cortical regions. Findings are relevant to cognitive scientists as they show that the virtual representationof hands is important as it increases task engagement, while not taxing mental workload or spatial processes in the brain.