Improving Intuitive Reasoning Through Assistance Strategies in a Virtual Reality Game

Intuitive reasoning relies on intuition, experience and affective judgment in order to resolve problems and acquire knowledge. This form of intelligence, based on unconscious learning, provides fast access to knowledge and is most of the time filled from learning by experience. Virtual Reality (VR) is a way to offer environments in which a user can deploy intuitive reasoning and acquire knowledge faster than usual academic training. In this paper, we use Inertia, a VR game that we have designed to teach some basic physics rules. We assess emotional behavior of the participants considering their engagement or frustration in the game, through electroencephalograms. Assistance strategies are integrated into the game to provide help according to the emotional measures. Inertia is composed of four types of games (Bowling 1, Bowling 2, Pivot, and Billiard) available on two versions (V0: without assistance strategies and V1: with assistance strategies). According to the data collected from the two versions, we noticed that assistance strategies could improve participants’ performance of more than 50% for some games (more precisely Billiard). The impact appeared not only in terms of reducing the number of failures, increasing the number of success, but also increasing the scores in all categories of the game.