Watch This! Observational Learning in VR Promotes Better Far Transfer than Active Learning for a Fine Psychomotor Task

Virtual Reality (VR) holds great potential for psychomotor training, with existing applications using almost exclusively a ‘learning-by-doing’ active learning approach, despite the possible benefits of incorporating observational learning. We compared active learning (n=26) with different variations of observational learning in VR for a manual assembly task. For observational learning, we considered three levels of visual similarity between the demonstrator avatar and the user, dissimilar (n=25), minimally similar (n=26), or a self-avatar (n=25), as similarity has been shown to improve learning. Our results suggest observational learning can be effective in VR when combined with ‘hands-on’ practice and can lead to better far skill transfer to real-world contexts that differ from the training context. Furthermore, we found self-similarity in observational learning can be counterproductive when focusing on a manual task, and skills decay quickly without further training. We discuss these findings and derive design recommendations for future VR training.