Sait Durgun earned his Bachelor’s (2017) and Master’s (2019) in Tourism Management from Gazi University, Türkiye. Since 2019, he has been a researcher in the Department of Tourism Management at Süleyman Demirel University, Türkiye. In 2023, he was awarded a scholarship from the Scientific Council of Türkiye, enabling him to pursue his Ph.D. research at Breda University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands. His research interests include tourism and leisure experiences, virtual reality, work-break recovery, quantitative methods, and physiological measurement techniques.

In this seminar, I will present findings from my ongoing PhD research to understand how virtual reality (VR) tourism experiences lead to mental recovery. The research used Electroencephalography (EEG), an advanced psychophysiological tool, to measure participants’ immediate neural responses during VR sessions. The aim is to explore the psychophysiological mechanisms behind the restorative effect of VR tourism experiences by studying brain signals. The presentation will include an overview of the methodology, sharing of findings and a discussion on practical implications for both academic and industrial applications.