Impact of an Immersive Virtual Reality experience in children's cognition and emotions

The research project will investigate if Immersive Virtual Environment Technologies (IVET) have the capability to increase the children ability to identify emotions and experience them in a more vivid and intense way, leading to a better memory recall of the events. 70 participants aged 6 to 7.9-year-old children were recruited and randomly assigned to one of three conditions under which they were presented with an emotional story in one of these modalities: IVET, Video (2D), or Book. After the story was experienced by the child, we assessed how the condition affected their recall of the story and the identification of emotions presented in the story. Results showed that children in the IVET condition are less prone to error in the memory recall task than the ones in the Video and Book condition and that children using digital media tend to rank emotions higher during the memory recall than children in the book condition.