The Virtual Shop: A new immersive virtual reality environment and scenario for the assessment of everyday memory

Abstract

Background: Assessing and predicting memory performance in everyday life is a common assignment for neuropsychologists. However, most traditional neuropsychological tasks are not conceived to capture everyday memory performance.

New method: The Virtual Shop is a fully immersive task developed to assess memory in a more ecological way than traditional neuropsychological assessments. Two studies were undertaken to assess the feasibility of the Virtual Shop and to appraise its ecological and construct validity. In study 1, 20 younger and 19 older adults completed the Virtual Shop task to evaluate its level of difficulty and the way the participants interacted with the VR material. The construct validity was examined with the contrasted-group method, by comparing the performance of younger and older adults. In study 2, 35 individuals with subjective cognitive decline completed the Virtual Shop task. Performance was correlated with an existing questionnaire evaluating everyday memory in order to appraise its ecological validity. To add further support to its construct validity, performance was correlated with traditional episodic memory and executive tasks.

Results: All participants successfully completed the Virtual Shop. The task had an appropriate level of difficulty that helped differentiate younger and older adults, supporting the feasibility and construct validity of the task.

Comparison with existing method(s): The performance on the Virtual Shop was significantly and moderately correlated with the performance on the questionnaire and on the traditional memory and executive tasks.

Conclusions: Results support the feasibility and both the ecological and construct validity of the Virtual Shop.

Keywords: Aging; Memory; Neuropsychological assessment; Virtual environment; Virtual reality.