The research team, led by Joanna Kisker, Merle Sagehorn, and Thomas Gruber of the Institute of Psychology at Osnabrück University, set out to test a provocative idea: that the encoding modality itself—whether an object was encountered in immersive three-dimensional virtual reality or on a flat two-dimensional screen—becomes part of the memory trace, bound to the remembered item like a contextual tag. If true, the medium could influence not just how well we remember, but which cognitive machinery we recruit when we do.

To probe this, thirty-one participants encoded everyday three-dimensional objects in both settings. In the virtual reality condition, they sat before a grey virtual table wearing an HTC Vive Pro 2 head-mounted display delivering 2,448 by 2,448 pixels per eye at 90 hertz. In the desktop condition, the same virtual environment was rendered in two dimensions on a 55-inch display. Visual angles were carefully matched across conditions using a fixation cube as reference, ensuring that any differences in memory could not be attributed to mere differences in stimulus size or viewing distance.

Crucially, each object came with an incidental task: participants either judged whether the object would fit inside a shoebox or indicated whether it sat in the front or rear position on the table. This dual-task design allowed the researchers to separate two kinds of contextual information—task-related details and the sensory modality of the experience itself. After encoding, participants moved to an electroencephalography laboratory, completed a digit span task to block rehearsal, and then faced an unannounced recognition test featuring all 300 objects, including 100 new distractors.

Behaviorally, the results were sobering for virtual reality enthusiasts. Participants correctly recognized roughly 51 percent of previously encoded objects regardless of whether they had been learned in virtual reality or on the desktop, and they showed no advantage in recalling the encoding modality or task. Signal detection measures confirmed that discrimination between old and new items was equivalent across conditions, with a conservative response bias in both. The recognition task was rated as difficult, and hit rates ran about 25 percent lower than in the team’s preceding study, likely reflecting the added cognitive load of switching between the size and position tasks during encoding.

The electrophysiological picture, however, told a subtler story. Recognition memory is thought to rely on two complementary processes: familiarity, a fast, automatic sense of having encountered something before, and recollection, a slower, effortful retrieval of contextual details from the original episode. These processes leave distinct signatures in the event-related potential. An early frontal effect between 300 and 500 milliseconds, the FN400, is typically associated with familiarity, while a later parietal positivity between 500 and 800 milliseconds, the LPC, is linked to recollection.

In the current study, both virtual reality-encoded and desktop-encoded objects produced robust FN400 old/new effects, indicating that familiarity contributed comparably to recognition regardless of encoding medium. The LPC, by contrast, was significant only for virtual reality-encoded items; the corresponding effect for desktop-encoded items fell short of significance, and the direct comparison between the two modalities did not reach statistical significance. The authors interpret this pattern as tentative evidence that virtual reality encoding may be associated with relatively greater recollection-related retrieval, consistent with a growing body of work from their laboratory and others.

The study also examined the late posterior negativity, an ERP component tied to the effortful search for and reconstruction of contextual details. By sorting the same retrieval-locked brain responses according to two different source judgments—whether participants later correctly identified the encoding modality and whether they correctly identified the encoding task—the researchers could ask whether modality-specific neural effects reflect the medium itself or broader contextual recollection. The answer was inconclusive: while the LPN differed descriptively between source types, the direct comparison did not establish a statistically reliable difference, suggesting the component was not uniquely tied to either judgment.

These findings complicate the popular narrative that virtual reality automatically supercharges memory. Rather than boosting overall performance, immersive encoding may shift the balance between familiarity and recollection, favoring richer, context-laden retrieval at the expense of quick, gist-like recognition. The authors also caution that their design cannot fully separate the dimensionality of the stimulus from that of the surrounding environment, and that source judgments were made only after the old/new decision, meaning the ERP effects reflect correlates of subsequent source accuracy rather than direct modulation by retrieval demands.

The implications reach beyond the laboratory. If virtual reality experiences genuinely recruit recollection-based retrieval more strongly than screen-based ones, immersive environments could prove valuable for memory training, education, and clinical rehabilitation—particularly for populations where recollection is selectively impaired. But the Osnabrück team is careful: the present data do not establish a robust modality-specific shift, and future studies manipulating retrieval orientation, task focus, and retrieval modality will be needed to pin down exactly when and why the brain treats a virtual encounter differently from one on a screen.

Subject of Research: Electrophysiological correlates of episodic memory retrieval after virtual reality versus desktop encoding

Article Title: Electrophysiological correlates of contextual retrieval following virtual reality and desktop-based encoding

Article References: Electrophysiological correlates of contextual retrieval following virtual reality and desktop-based encoding. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2026.1866317

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2026.1866317

Keywords: virtual reality, episodic memory, recognition memory, EEG, event-related potentials, FN400, LPC, LPN, source memory, familiarity, recollection, cognitive neuroscience