ArticleJMIR serious games2026
Behavioral and Physiological Responses to Sensory and Cognitive Demands in an Immersive Virtual Reality Shopping Task in Unimpaired Young Adults: Within-Subjects Experimental Study.
Article in JMIR serious games, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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4 authors.
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Abstract
backgroundImmersive virtual reality (IVR) is increasingly used for task training. Adjusting sensory and cognitive complexity to individual capacity is important for effective training, yet it remains unclear how varying visual, auditory, and cognitive demands influence behavioral responses, physiological activity, and task performance during goal-directed activities in IVR.
objectiveThis study aimed to examine how 2 levels (low and high) of visual, auditory, and mental demands affect self-reported mental demand and effort (MDE), task performance, heart rate, gaze behavior, and head movements during a virtual grocery shopping task.
methodsA within-subjects study was conducted with 22 unimpaired university students (11 women, 11 men; aged 23-27 years) recruited via convenience sampling at TU Delft, the Netherlands. Participants completed a grocery shopping task (collecting products from shelves during 122-second trials) under 7 conditions: baseline, visual low/high (background characters), auditory low/high (background sounds), and mental low/high (0-back/2-back tasks), in random order. Outcome measures included MDE (0-100), task performance (products placed in the cart), mean heart rate (from electrocardiography), head-stillness duration, and gaze duration on areas of interest (via integrated eye-tracking). Two-tailed paired-samples t tests with Bonferroni correction (α=.008) were supplemented by linear mixed-effects models.
resultsThe mental high condition produced the largest effects: MDE increased relative to baseline (mean difference [M
conclusionsCognitive demands strongly impacted workload, performance, and behavior, while sensory demands affected attention distribution and perceived workload, with no significant performance decrements at the Bonferroni-corrected threshold. By comparing 2 demand levels against a no-demand baseline and incorporating gaze and head-movement measures not previously examined, this study extends prior work in this domain. The findings suggest IVR environments can incorporate sensory richness without large performance reductions in unimpaired young adults, and that behavioral strategies under cognitive load may support real-world workload monitoring and adaptive task adjustment, pending clinical validation.
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