To see a painting versus to walk in a painting: an experiment on sense-making through virtual reality

It has been maintained that Virtual Reality (VR) may allow students to "get into" the representation simulated by the computer, so that they can mentally act on the relation they have with the representation of the world instead of acting on the relation they have with the world itself. This should help students to realise some critical issues involved in knowledge construction and to grasp important epistemological implications. This general assumption needs to be empirically tested, for instance by showing that mental operations elicited by VR environments differ from those occurring in traditional instructional settings. The present experiment aimed to provide evidence for this, by focusing on a particular cognitive process: making sense. Forty university students were randomly assigned tither to a reflection condition or to a VR immersion condition. In the first condition participants looked at the two-dimensional reproduction of an unfamiliar painting; in the second condition they were taken into a guided virtual tour into the same painting. Four tasks (to propose a title for the painting, to identify its meaning, to list questions suggested by it, and to write a comment) were given. Analyses of protocols revealed that students in the VR condition were induced to assume spontaneously a meta-perspective, namely, to think not to "what" they face, but to "why" or "how" something is in front of them. VR experience also prompted students to conceptualise experience at an abstract level and stimulated a free and imaginative elaboration. The reflection condition, instead, encouraged emphasis to be placed on the cultural or inferential links. Findings suggested that the outstanding features of VR for instruction, refer to the possibility that VR allows users to become aware of some implicit assumptions concerning the relations between our mind and the world. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.