Investigating the redundancy principle in immersive virtual reality environments: An eye‐tracking and EEG study.

Background: The increased availability of immersive virtual reality (IVR) has led to a surge of immersive technology applications in education. Nevertheless, very little is known about how to effectively design instruction for this new media, so that it would benefit learning and associated cognitive processing. Objectives: This experiment explores if and how traditional instructional design principles from 2D media translate to IVR. Specifically, it focuses on studying the underlying mechanisms of the redundancy‐principle, which states that presenting the same information concurrently in two different sensory channels can cause cognitive overload and might impede learning. Methods: A total of 73 participants learned through a specifically‐designed educational IVR application in three versions: (1) auditory representation format, (2) written representation format, and (3) a redundancy format (i.e. both written and auditory formats). The study utilized advanced psychophysiological methods of Electroencephalography (EEG) and eye‐tracking (ET), learning measures and self‐report scales. Results and Conclusions: Results show that participants in the redundancy condition performed equally well on retention and transfer post‐tests. Similarly, results from the subjective measures, EEG and ET suggest that redundant content was not found to be more cognitively demanding than written content alone. Implications: Findings suggest that the redundancy effect might not generalize to VR as originally anticipated in 2D media research, providing direct implications to the design of IVR tools for education. Lay Description: What is currently known about the topic: Immersive virtual reality (IVR) applications for learning are on the rise, yet little is known about how to effectively design this medium to impact learning and cognition.Even in IVR, many use traditional learning content of text and audio, and ground instructional design decisions in 2D media design guidelines, such as the Redundancy Principle.Redundancy principle states that presenting the same information concurrently in two different sensory channels can cause cognitive overload and might impede learning. What this paper adds to the field: This study examines if and how the Redundancy Principle translates from traditional 2D media to immersive VR.EEG, Eye‐tracking and objective measures were used to study the underlying mechanisms of redundant information processing. The implications of study findings for practitioners: Results show that the redundancy effect might not generalize to VR as originally anticipated in 2D media research.Study shows that the redundancy group performed equally well on learning outcomes and it wasn't found to be more cognitively loading.The study is amongst the first to reveal that participants spend most of their time reading in the redundancy condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]