Cognitive effort in virtual worlds in the metaverse versus instant messaging: Disruptive impacts on team performance and strategies for recovery

Virtual worlds (VWs), an integral part of the metaverse, offer immense potential for virtual team collaboration. However, adoption challenges persist due to subpar user experience, highlighting the need to address the theoretical gap in understanding collaboration within VWs versus traditional virtual tools. This study applies Media Naturalness Theory (MNT) to compare cognitive effort, a vital user experience indicator, in VWs and instant messaging (IM). It also examines cognitive effort's impact on team performance, assessing two interventions: self-paced training and an icebreaker exercise. Data from three experiments reveal that VWs demand higher cognitive effort, resulting in diminished team performance. Self-paced training significantly narrows the cognitive effort gap between VW and IM users, while the icebreaker exercise reduces cognitive effort for both. These findings address the theoretical gap by suggesting that VW adoption hesitancy may stem from unfavorable comparisons with familiar alternatives and by emphasizing the importance of such comparisons to avoid misrepresenting VWs as inherently superior. This study also highlights the importance of media theories like MNT, which emphasize both media characteristics and user adaptation, for understanding collaboration challenges in VWs. It contributes to practice by identifying interventions to reduce the cognitive effort disparity between VWs and IM.