The Impact of Fantasy on Young Children’s Recall: A Virtual Reality Approach

Educational materials for preschool children are often embedded with fantastical elements. Nevertheless, there is still little empirical evidence on their effectiveness, especially as concerns long-term retention. Virtual reality offers new ecological possibilities for investigating this type of learning, especially through the impact of immersion. In a between-design study, 168 children aged four to six years followed a virtual reality presentation on China presented by either a realistic young girl or an anthropomorphic animal. The level of immersion was manipulated, with half of the children following the presentation in immersive virtual reality (IVR) and the other half in desktop virtual reality (D-VR). Participants were asked to complete a new/old recognition task and a quiz task immediately after the presentation and once again one week later, with an additional transfer task being added for the second series. One week later, children performed significantly better on the new/old recognition task in the realistic condition when compared to the anthropomorphic condition. However, there were no differences observed in the quiz task and in the transfer task. It therefore seems that, under certain conditions, children remember a cultural presentation better when it is presented by a realistic avatar. The results further showed that the children performed significantly worse in the IVR conditions on all tasks. A possible explanation for this result is that IVR demands excessive cognitive resources from preschool children. Further studies should explore this unexpected result, as well as what could be done to make IVR effective for learning in preschool children.