Immersion and Control in Learning Art Knowledge: An Example in Museum Visit

New technologies are extensively used in learning and their potential positive impact is still evaluated, in particular on tablets and Virtual Reality (VR). The interest of this technology is the immersion and the control they can bring to the learning environment. To study the impact of the degree of immersion and control on learning we evaluate the performance, intrinsic motivation and self regulation on a first experiment. The task consisted of a virtual visit of a 3D museum based on four different conditions, (1) high immersion with active VR, (2) passive high immersion, (3) low immersion with active tablet, (4) passive low immersion. The intrinsic motivation and emotion were evaluated with a self-reported questionnaire, and self regulation with behavioral indicator. Results show that an active control of the learning improves performance, but it did not impact intrinsic motivation and had a partial impact on self regulation. Immersion had no impact on performance and intrinsic motivation, but it impacts partially self regulation. Because overall performance was quite low, we supposed that participants were mentally overloaded by the high amount of information. To test the effect of cognitive load, we did a second experiment in which a low cognitive load condition was added and compared to the sample of experiment one who was in a high cognitive load condition. Results showed higher performance in low cognitive load condition rather than in high one. Also control still had a positive impact on learning on low cognitive load, and immersion had no impact.