Abstract
Life expectancy is constantly increasing in developed countries. Unfortunately, a longer life does not always correspond to a healthier life, as even normal aging is associated with cognitive decline and increased risk factors for neurodegenerative diseases. Episodic memory (EM) is one of the most vulnerable cognitive functions in aging, and its decline is the hallmark of typical Alzheimer’s disease. This memory system is defined as the ability to acquire and recollect personally experienced episodes associated with a specific affective, spatial, and temporal context. However, most of the neuropsychological and experimental tasks currently employed to assess EM consist in learning simple material (e.g., list of words) in highly stereotyped contexts. In the same vein, classical paper-and-pencil or numeric remediation tools have shown their limitations in the transfer of acquired skills to daily life. Virtual reality (VR), thanks to its immersive properties, and the possibility of delivering realistic and complex scenarios, seems a promising tool to address the limitations of the assessment and remediation of EM. Here, we review existing studies employing VR in normal and pathological aging to assess and reeducate EM. Overall, we show that VR has been mainly used via non-immersive systems. Further studies should, therefore, test the impact of different degrees of immersion. Moreover, there is a lack of VR remediation tools specifically targeting EM. We propose that future studies should fill this gap, addressing in particular the adaptivity of VR remediation protocols.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Clinical and Health Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
The association between the degree of interaction and memory performance has been shown to depend on the executive performances. These findings suggest that the interaction should be tailored, when using Virtual reality (VR) as a cognitive remediation tool, to the cognitive abilities of the participants
We have presented a glimpse of VR applications for the assessment and training of Episodic memory (EM) in normal and pathological aging
Summary
In a first pilot study, Plancher et al (2008) employed NIS VR (the environment was projected on a 85 cm × 110 cm screen) to investigate the effects of age (young vs. older adults), encoding (intentional vs. incidental), and exploration (active vs. passive) on the main aspects of EM. They reported that older participants were selectively impaired in higherorder binding (e.g., associating several items of contextual information), in particular in recalling the spatio-temporal context in the intentional encoding condition They showed that memory performances assessed using VR were more reliably associated with general cognitive functioning and subjective memory complaints, compared with standard neuropsychological tools. The Virtual Shop is a new FIS-IS interactive environment in which participants have to select a list of items, previously memorized outside VR, during navigation in a convenience store (Corriveau Lecavalier et al, 2018) In their first study, the authors compared the performances of young and old participants, reporting that older adults performed less well. The authors concluded that performances in VR tasks might provide a more accurate “age fair” estimation of everyday life than standard neuropsychological tools
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