Our team members Dr. Christian Hartmann, Dr. Christian Kosel, Annabel Wolf, and Prof. Dr. Maria Bannert have published a new open access article in the international, peer-reviewed journal Computers & Education: X Reality. The paper examines how environmental detail and content coherence influence learning, attention, and motivation in immersive virtual reality (IVR). In a controlled laboratory experiment, university students learned in a high-fidelity virtual replica of the Sistine Chapel while instructional content was either coherent or incoherent with the surrounding virtual environment. The study combines learning outcome measures with eye-tracking data to provide fine-grained insights into learners’ attentional processes. While immersive scenes increased enjoyment and attention to environmental features, they did not necessarily support learning. The findings further highlight the importance of instructional sequencing and introduce mental situation models as a promising perspective for understanding learning in immersive environments.