Learning in Affectively Intense Virtual Environments - LITE

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during the course of such games may be common place for a gamer lest the “dead” game
based opponent should return to “kill” the computer player. In any case, it’s very
interesting to note that these two subscales showed a high degree of discriminate validity,
in that their predictions of similar variables were very different. Based on these results, it
appears that different types of immersive tendency have very different effects on a
learner’s ability to learn effectively in immersive environments. In one case the tendency
to become immersed is very positive and in the latter case it is equally negative.
4.4.2. Affect Intensity (ID). Statistically it may be noted that the higher the
affect intensity score, the lesser the probability of finding bodies or injured personnel in
the virtual environment. Based on the nature of the affect intensity construct, those with
high affect intensity scores tend to react highly emotionally. Taking that nature into
consideration, the virtual simulation with the head mounted display might have provided
an affective environment both physically and virtually in which the ability to respond to
the experiment objectives were lessened. Most of their emotions would have been
directed to the environment and to the unnatural or new experience of wearing a head
mounted display that sufficient energies were devoted to accomplishing the task at hand.
Given the similar results, in appears that affect intensity is related to the focus component
of the immersive tendencies questionnaire.
4.4.3. Gender. There was virtually no difference between males and females
on the location of dead bodies. However, the mean for males almost doubled the female
mean (M = 3.267 vs. 1.174) for successful identification of the location of an injured
persons. This is in accordance with the observations that males focused more on
identifying the injured as noted in the qualitative analysis. This aim of saving the injured
fueled the males to narrow their search and yielded better results compared to females
who had a broader objective. It may be noted that the instructions to locate the dead and
injured personnel in the building was common for both males and females.
4.5. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VR EXPERIENCE AND LEARNING
OUTCOMES
4.5.1. Presence. Statistical data showed that the presence scores are largely
unrelated to the learning outcomes of Dead Correct Count and Injured Correct Count.
This could be because the environment may have afforded a high degree of presence due