Virtual reality games and tests help children improve cognitive skills. But what about the adults?
New research from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London has made some crucial discoveries on this. The study was published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.
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It suggested that a virtual reality test in which participants "go to the shops" could offer a potentially promising way of effectively assessing functional cognition, the thinking and processing skills needed to accomplish complex everyday activities.
The research used a novel virtual reality shopping task called "VStore" to measure cognition, asking participants to participate in tests designed to mirror the real world. Researchers hoped that it would test for age-related cognitive decline in the future.
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Prof Sukhi Shergill, the study's lead author from King's College IoPPN and Kent and Medway Medical School (KMMS) said, "Virtual Reality appears to offer us significant advantages over more traditional pen-and-paper methods. The simple act of going to a shop to collect and pay for a list of items is something that we are all familiar with, but also actively engages multiple parts of the brain. Our study suggests that VStore may be suitable for evaluating functional cognition in the future. However, more work needs to be done before we can confirm this."
The trial recruited 142 healthy individuals aged 20-79 years. Each participant was asked to "go to the shops," first verbally recalling a list of 12 items, before being assessed for the amount of time it took to collect the items, as well as select the corresponding items on a virtual self-checkout machine, pay, and order coffee.
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Cognition tests, such as those used to measure the deficits present in several neuropsychiatric disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, and depression, are traditionally time-consuming and demanding. Vstore, the technology that the researchers used in this study - has been designed to overcome these limitations to provide a more accurate, engaging, and cost-effective process to explore a person's cognitive health.
Researchers established that Vstore effectively engaged a range of key neuropsychological functions simultaneously, suggesting that the functional tasks in virtual reality may employ a greater range of cognitive domains than standard assessments
(ANI)
