Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Students cheating on an exam in an academic setting createsan environment where one person (the student) must reasonabout the perception of another (the teacher). In exploring thestudent’s mindset, trends concerning how humans make deci-sions based on their understanding of another human’s inten-tions and knowledge can be uncovered. In this work, we studyhuman cheating behavior through simulated examinations invirtual reality, showing that the teacher’s animacy and orienta-tion plays a large part in the student’s reasoning of the teacher’sawareness. By utilizing a virtual classroom setting and accu-rately tracking a users behavior (through head tracking, eyemovement, etc.), we have also demonstrated how a novel vir-tual reality approach can be used for such experiments involv-ing human behavioral observations, which can be further ex-plored in other cognitive science research experiments.