Perception Meets Examination: Studying Deceptive Behaviors in VR

Students cheating on an exam in an academic setting creates an environment where one person (the student) must reason about the perception of another (the teacher). In exploring the student’s mindset, trends concerning how humans make decisions based on their understanding of another human’s intentions and knowledge can be uncovered. In this work, we study human cheating behavior through simulated examinations in virtual reality, showing that the teacher’s animacy and orientation plays a large part in the student’s reasoning of the teacher’s awareness. By utilizing a virtual classroom setting and accurately tracking a users behavior (through head tracking, eye movement, etc.), we have also demonstrated how a novel virtual reality approach can be used for such experiments involving human behavioral observations, which can be further explored in other cognitive science research experiments.