Investigation of the impact of exploring a novel environment on episodic memory performance

Whether exposure to a novel environment in virtual reality improves subsequent verbal memory or not is still debated. The present study is an attempt to replicate previous positive findings. To do so, we assessed whether exploration of a novel virtual environment leads to better word memory than exploration of a familiar environment and whether this effect is related to the exploratory behavior. Fifty-five young participants completed three sessions. The first session consisted of assessing the baseline memory performance. In this memory task, participants encoded a list of 40 words and then freely recalled as many words as possible, immediately and after a 24-hour delay. In the second session, participants started with a familiarization phase with a virtual environment and then explored the familiar or a novel environment before performing a memory task. In the third and last session, participants explored either the familiar or novel virtual environment (according to the condition they did not fulfill in the second session) before performing the memory task. Like some other prior studies, our results failed to find a positive impact of exploring a novel environment (i.e., spatial novelty) on memory performance. Rather, we observed that memory recall is higher after exploring a virtual environment (regardless of it being novel or familiar) compared to the baseline performance. In fact, the experience of virtual reality might induce another type of novelty, called distinct novelty, which could impact memory too. We discuss how future studies could try disentangling the effect of these two types of novelty on subsequent memory performance. We believe this is a necessary step to understand the conflicting results between existing studies.