Do Embodied Experiences Promote Knowledge Construction?: A Case from Digital Humanities VR
Qingyu Duan, Xiaoguang Wang, Menghang Xu · 2024
This study aims to explore whether embodied experiences in virtual reality (VR) can promote the cultural education in digital humanities and heritages. Using a controlled experimental method, data on users' working memory, cognitive load, and emotional response were collected in three environments with different levels of embodied experience: VR, video, and printed materials. The results show that embodied experience has a strong positive effect on emotional responses; there is a certain cognitive resource competition between emotional cognition and working memory; and working memory processed information using both body-based and sociocultural-based cognitive frames. In the future, it is necessary to improve the narrative emotions during embodied experiences and to guide the allocation of limited cognitive resources to knowledge construction tasks through the integration of multimodal representations.