To VR or Not to VR: Assessing Cybersickness in Navigational Tasks at Different Levels of Immersion

The advent of affordable, high-quality virtual reality (VR) devices has revolutionized experimental research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, offering more immersive and naturalistic environments for studying skills like spatial navigation. However, the increased incidence of cybersickness in VR may compromise its advantages, necessitating appropriate tools to assess this phenomenon and understand its impact on experimental outcomes. Despite the growing use of VR in research, there is a lack of consensus on the most effective methods for measuring cybersickness across different experimental modalities and over time. Here, we compared two cybersickness assessment tools: the widely-used Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ) and the more recent Cybersickness in VR Questionnaire (CSQ-VR). Using a maze navigation task, we examined how cybersickness is modulated by modality (Desktop vs. VR) and habituation in a gender-balanced, young Spanish sample (n = 26) with a within-subjects design. Our results demonstrate high internal consistency for both tools, and that VR-induced cybersickness decreases with task repetition without apparent impact on performance.