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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychology of Language
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1433781
This article is part of the Research Topic Community Series: Spanish Psycholinguistics - Volume II View all articles

Weathering Words: A Virtual Reality Study of Environmental Influence on Reading Dynamics

Provisionally accepted
Francisco Rocabado Francisco Rocabado 1Laís Muntini Laís Muntini 2Jorge González Alonso Jorge González Alonso 1,3*Jon Andoni Dunabeitia Jon Andoni Dunabeitia 1
  • 1 Nebrija University, Madrid, Madrid, Spain
  • 2 Technical University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany
  • 3 UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Reading is an integral cognitive activity, influenced by both textual and external environmental factors, though the latter remains less explored. Using Virtual Reality (VR) technology, we investigated how visual contrast and simulated weather conditions affect reading dynamics. Experiment 1 revealed that high visual contrast, especially in sunny conditions, significantly boosted single-word recognition speed, showing the significant influence of environmental visual conditions through a lexical decision task. Experiment 2, however, displayed a different dynamic on a sentence reading task: while visual contrast had minimal impact on reading, sunny weather led to faster reading times, and rainy scenarios resulted in increased eye fixations. These results suggest that environmental factors can significantly affect reading behavior. The current study collaborates with the characterization of the key features influencing reading in daily life contexts. It can inform the design of ergonomic reading materials, particularly in outdoor and VR environments. The integration of stimuli within a controlled environment and its manipulation increases ecological validity in the reading research and highlights the potential of VR as a tool for in-depth cognitive research.

    Keywords: virtual reality, Ecological Validity, lexical decision task, Reading Disfluency, Visual noise

    Received: 16 May 2024; Accepted: 27 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Rocabado, Muntini, González Alonso and Dunabeitia. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Jorge González Alonso, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway

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