Schedule of Events | Symposia

The effects of immersive virtual reality on neural processing of spatial navigation

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Chih-Mao Huang¹ (cmhuang40@nycu.edu.tw), Hsu-Wen Huang²; ¹National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, ²National Health Research Institutes, Taiwan

The neurocognitive effects of using virtual reality (VR) have attracted considerable interest. Behavioral and neuroimaging studies have suggested that VR experiences are associated with improved performance in visuospatial navigation and increased brain volume in regions such as the entorhinal cortex, hippocampus, and occipital cortex. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how immersive VR experiences using a head-mounted display (HMD) affect neural processing during spatial navigation. We studied 36 immersive VR (IVR) users and 38 non-virtual reality (NVR) users while they navigated a virtual maze task during the fMRI scan. Behavioral data revealed no significant differences in landmark identification between the IVR and NVR groups. However, whole brain analysis revealed that the NVR group showed greater activation in the bilateral caudate, bilateral precuneus, left middle cingulate gyrus, right superior frontal gyrus, left superior temporal gyrus, right hippocampus, left paracentral gyrus, right precentral gyrus, left posterior cingulate gyrus and left middle frontal gyrus during the maze task compared to the control task. We also found a significant negative correlation between supplementary motor area activity and the HMD use, as well as between the cerebellar activity and HMD use. These findings suggest that NVR users engage more extensive and distributed brain regions involved in spatial navigation, supporting the notion that immersive VR experiences contribute to neuroplasticity and enhanced neural efficiency in the human brain.

Topic Area: THINKING: Decision making