The impact of fear of the sea on working memory performance: a research based on virtual reality

Dandan Pan, Qing Xu, Shiqiang Ma, Kunlong Zhang

Abstract: The sea has been manifested to cause the emotion of fear to people when it comes to a very depth, especially to those who have thalassophobia. Many people have to work in the sea while nearly no research on influence of fear of the sea to cognition has been carried out. This study explores the impact of fear of the sea induced by immersive virtual reality on working memory which is a cognitive system with a limited capacity. Participants were required to complete n-back working memory task of three difficulty levels in the non-emotional environment and the undersea environment respectively by means of virtual reality. Pupil diameter changes were recorded along with the task performance. In addition to reaction times and accuracy (correctly press a button in response to targets) as two task performance indices used in most researches, the commission errors (incorrectly press a button in response to non-targets) and omission errors (incorrectly do not press a button in response to targets) were also differentiated herein. The results of the study indicated that the virtual undersea environment did induce the emotion of fear. As for the task performance, except that the performance of low-level task did not differ much between the two environments, the fear of the sea increased the accuracy of the medium level n-back task but decreased it of high-level n-back task. Result of omission errors was just the opposite and commission errors were increased in both levels of task. The findings, including the positive role of a moderate level of fear of the sea in the performance of working memory task, make a lot of sense for future cognitive work in the sea.