What are you looking at? Using eye tracking to improve learning in virtual environments

Learning in Virtual Reality (VR) is an emerging topic characterized by opposing theories. The interest theory hypothesizes that students who learned in immersive VR would report more positive ratings of interest and motivation and would thus score higher on a test covering the lesson learned. On the other hand, the cognitive theory of multimedia learning assumes that students who learned with a classic medium would score higher on a test covering the lesson learned, while reporting lower in terms of interest and motivation. In this proposal, I focus on the concept of learning in VR, which is an emerging concept in information science (IS) research that can be studied using neurological measures such as eye tracking. While previous literature has provided initial evidence of the feasibility of eye tracking in a learning context, this study seeks to investigate how well eye tracking performs when it comes to detecting items inducing superfluous cognitive load in a VR setting.