Immersive virtual reality cave environments can induce higher emotional arousal, spiritual engagement, and improvements in creativity and flexible thinking compared to virtual open spaces. Participants performed pareidolic tasks in both settings, and the cave setting led to changes in semantic network organization and subjective experience. These findings support the hypothesis that ancient humans used caves for rituals involving altered consciousness, and demonstrate that VR can reconstruct early human experiences to investigate psychological and cognitive states. The work bridges cognitive archaeology and immersive VR technologies.
Playing a videogame in a virtual reality headset increases feelings of presence and alters aspects of conscious experience related to embodiment, such as disembodiment and positive depersonalization, compared to playing on a desktop computer. Adding a treadmill for full-body locomotion further increases immersion. The most immersive condition also distorts retrospective time estimation, making it less accurate. However, immersive gameplay does not broadly change executive functions like cognitive flexibility. The findings suggest that virtual reality selectively affects embodiment-related conscious experience and time perception without general effects on cognition.