The effect of exposure to novelty of virtual environments on memory as a function of level of processing at encoding

Exposure to a novel environment in virtual reality has been shown to improve subsequent verbal memory, but conflicting results exist. In the current study, we assessed whether exploration of a novel virtual environment leads to better word memory than exploration of a familiar environment and whether level-of-processing during encoding plays a role. Thirty-four young participants completed three sessions. The first session consisted of familiarisation with a virtual environment. In the following two sessions, participants explored the previously familiarized or a novel environment after which they performed a memory task. In this task, they encoded words under a deep and a shallow encoding condition and then freely recalled them before recognizing them among new words. The results indicated that, for words in the deep encoding condition, recall performance was better in the second session than the third one, in both the novel and familiar condition. For words in the shallow encoding condition, recall performance was better after exploration of the novel rather than familiar environment, only when the novel environment occurred in the third session. Novelty did not affect recognition memory. These findings provide partial support to the idea that environmental novelty benefits mainly weak memories, with the caveat of a session effect. Adding to previous conflicting results, this study suggests that the beneficial impact of environmental novelty on episodic memory appears under specific conditions, calling for further investigation.