Effects of Lighting Variations in Virtual Learning Environments

The use of virtual reality in education is giving researchers new designing opportunities to create learning environments with characteristics that are difficult or even impossible to implement in the real world. There are plenty of educational, cognitive, architectural and neuroscience theories suggesting that certain environmental aspects can enhance the learning process. Such an example is the variation of lighting conditions, in terms of intensity (high or low luminance) and/or temperature (cold or warm), that have been shown to improve memory, attention and executive functions. In this paper, we investigate the differences between a real and a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) regarding the effects of the lighting conditions on several cognitive functions while we apply, for the first time, certain lighting theories directly into a University level VLE. The first main outcome of our study is that lighting conditions in VLEs affect students’ cognitive functions in a similar way to traditional/physical learning environments, i.e. high luminance enhance memory, attention and executive functions when compared with low luminance. Our results indicate that if we need to test a cognitive or learning hypothesis, we can test it directly into a virtual environment since it gives us similar results/outcomes with those triggered in real one. Moreover, our results demonstrate that exposure to blue (cold) lighting in VLEs increase students’ scores, in the given pseudoword test, in comparison with their exposure to red (warm) lighting.