The Neurophysiology of Cybersickness: A Systematic Review of Neuromarkers, Neurostimulation, and Reporting Practices...

Visually induced motion sickness (VIMS) is a prevalent adverse response to virtual reality (VR) exposure, and its assessment has relied primarily on retrospective subjective questionnaires that cannot support continuous monitoring or real-time detection. This PRISMA-guided systematic review synthesizes 92 studies on the neurophysiology of VIMS in VR, retrieved from PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus through March 2025, spanning electroencephalography, functional near-infrared spectroscopy, and non-invasive neurostimulation. The EEG literature converges on increased low-frequency (delta and theta) power as the most consistent spectral correlate of VIMS. Alpha-band findings have been inconsistent across prior work; meta-analytic comparison of hardware platforms reported here attributes a substantial portion of that inconsistency to VR display type, with head-mounted-display and screen-based studies differing systematically in the direction of alpha and beta responses. Beyond spectral power, the corpus documents event-related potential evidence of attentional and inhibitory-control costs, fNIRS hemodynamic correlates, resting-state EEG predictors of individual susceptibility, and early closed-loop mitigation systems driven by neurophysiological detection. A systematic examination of the classification and prediction literature reveals recurrent reporting gaps (undisclosed decision thresholds, absent discriminative metrics, and validation schemes that place the same participant's data in both training and test sets) that limit the interpretability of headline performance figures. Together with hardware-related heterogeneity, baseline-selection variability, and terminological inconsistency, these gaps constrain cross-study synthesis. The causal status of observed neural associations, cross-subject generalization of detection models, and the neurodynamics of adaptation and recovery remain open empirical questions.