The selective enhancement hypothesis: how immersive VR differentially affects learning dimensions in heritage literature education

Heritage literature education faces a persistent challenge: texts central to cultural identity are often difficult to engage with, particularly at the level of interpretive understanding. Although immersive virtual reality (VR) shows promise in education, existing research largely treats learning as a unitary outcome, leaving its effects across knowledge dimensions unclear. We propose the Selective Enhancement Hypothesis (SEH), which predicts that VR benefits are dimension-specific rather than uniform. Across four knowledge dimensions, effects should be largest for interpretive understanding, smaller for literal comprehension and cultural knowledge, and minimal for contextual knowledge. Drawing on embodied cognition, construal level, and cognitive load theories, we account for this gradient through two ordering dimensions: sensorimotor dependence and constructive complexity. We identify cultural-world vividness, defined as the perceptual richness and spatial coherence of learners’ mental representations of a text’s cultural world, as the primary mediating mechanism. The framework addresses three persistent gaps in VR education research: the aggregation of learning outcomes, the absence of active controls, and limited attention to retention, through a three-group experimental design incorporating behavioral, self-report, and retention measures. SEH thus shifts VR education research from aggregate efficacy claims toward testable, dimension-specific predictions about where embodied immersion uniquely supports learning.