Balancing Exploration and Cybersickness: Investigating Curiosity-Driven Behavior in Virtual Environments

Virtual reality offers the opportunity for immersive exploration, yet it is often undermined by cybersickness. However, how individuals strike a balance between exploration and discomfort remains unclear. Existing method (e.g., reinforcement learning (RL)) often fail to fully capture the complexities of navigation and decision-making patterns. This study investigates how curiosity influences users’ navigation behavior, particularly how users strike a balance between exploration and discomfort. We propose curiosity as a key factor driving irrational decision-making and apply the free energy principle to model the relationship between curiosity and user behavior quantitatively. Our findings indicate that users generally adopt conservative strategies when navigating. Also, curiosity levels tend to rise when the virtual environment changes. These results illustrate the dynamic interplay between exploration and discomfort. In addition, it offers a new perspective on how curiosity drives behavior in immersive environments, providing a foundation for designing adaptive VR environments. Future research will further refine this model by incorporating additional psychological and environmental factors to improve prediction accuracy.