Teleportation Destination Previews Support Memory Retention During Virtual Navigation

Teleportation is one of the most widely used locomotion techniques in virtual reality (VR) because it is efficient, minimizes motion sickness, and enables large-scale spatial traversal with minimal effort. However, research on the Doorway Effect shows that spatial transitions can impair memory of information encountered just before the transition. Event Segmentation Theory (EST) explains this by proposing that salient changes disrupt a person’s working memory representation, causing recently encoded information to be replaced and reducing its availability for retrieval. By extension, the design of spatial transitions in VR may influence whether memory is disrupted or preserved, which could be a consideration in applied contexts such as education and training. One way to mitigate such impairment is to provide predictive cues about the upcoming change to reduce disruption. In VR, this can be implemented through teleportation previews, which give users a glimpse of the destination before arrival. In this experiment, we adapted the Doorway Effect paradigm to examine how two teleportation design factors — preview availability and environmental change — affect memory. Using a within-subjects 2 × 2 design (N = 27), participants studied a set of 3D objects, then teleported either within the same environment or into a different one, with or without a preview of the destination. After each transition, they completed a visual recognition task. Results showed two key findings: (1) without previews, recognition declined when teleporting into a different environment compared to remaining in the same one, and (2) when transitioning between different environments, providing a preview improved recognition relative to no preview. Together, these results indicate that both the distinctiveness of environments and the availability of previews shape memory during VR transitions. We discuss how these findings align with EST, highlight the cognitive consequences of teleportation design, and provide guidance for designing transitions that better support memory in applied contexts such as education and training.