Out-of-the-Ordinary Experiences in the Digital Era: Could Virtual (Un)Reality Improve Creativity?

Out-of-the-Ordinary experiences challenge preexisting cognitive schemata and may induce radical schema updates. Virtual Reality (VR) is ideal for generating such experiences: it simulates realistic environments while being free from physical constraints. The present research project investigates cognitive responses toVRscenarios that contradict our fundamental model of space as a Euclidean space. Because previous studies reported individual variability in acknowledging geometrically impossible scenarios as such, we investigated whether this depends on personality traits. We found that Personal Need for Structure (PNS) -measuring mental rigidity- negatively influenced the likelihood of reporting the spatial anomaly (Study 1). To verify that participants who did not report the anomaly were indeed unaware of it, we validated pupil dilation as a marker of surprise in response to expectancy violation during free navigation in VR (Study 2). In Study 3, we partially replicated Study 1: low PNS participants were more likely to report the spatial anomaly, but only in the case of male participants. We capitalized on the findings of study 2 and showed that participants who reported the anomaly displayed distinct pupillary responses compared to those who did not. We hypothesized that the latter tend to suppress high-level prediction errors to avoid cognitive dissonance and cognitive restructuring. Overall, our findings contribute to understanding the predictive processes underlying perception, and suggest the response to the violation of fundamental models is a trade-off between the benefits of an accurate representation and the costs of restructuring. Also, they address individual differences in responding to out-of-theordinary experiences. This may inform future studies on the effect of such experiences on creativity, and possibly explain why this effect varies across individuals.