Sensorimotor contingencies refer to the rules by which we naturally use our body to perceive – looking around, bending down, leaning forward to better see or hear something. It has been argued that to the extent that a virtual reality (VR) application affords natural sensorimotor contingencies for perception so the greater likelihood that participants will experience Place Illusion (PI), the illusion of 'being there' (a component of presence) in the environment depicted by the displays. However, in spite of numerous studies this only has anecdotal support, including the fact that almost all studies rely on questionnaires. Here we used a reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm where 26 participants experienced a VR scenario where the RL agent could sequentially propose changes to 5 binary factors: mono or stereo vision, 3 or 6 degrees of freedom head tracking, mono or spatialised sound, low or high display resolution, or one of two colour schemes. The first 4 are sensorimotor contingencies, whereas the change to colour is not. Participants could reject or accept the changes proposed by the RL, with this continuing until convergence. Participants were more likely to accept changes from low to high sensorimotor contingencies than changes to the colour. Additionally, theory has suggested that increased PI should be associated with lower entropy of eye scanpaths, corresponding to what has been observed in reality. The results show that mean entropy did decrease over time and the final level of entropy was negatively correlated with a post exposure questionnaire-based assessment of PI.