Abstract
Virtual reality environments presented on tablets and smartphones have potential to aid the early diagnosis of conditions such as Alzheimer’s dementia by quantifying impairments in navigation performance. However, it is unclear whether performance on mobile devices can predict navigation errors in the real world. We compared the performance of 49 participants (25 females, 18-35 years old) at wayfinding and path integration tasks designed in our mobile app ‘Sea Hero Quest’ with their performance at similar tasks in a real-world environment. We first performed this experiment in the streets of London (UK) and replicated it in Paris (France). In both cities, we found a significant correlation between virtual and real-world wayfinding performance and a male advantage in both environments, although smaller in the real world (Cohen’s d in the game = 0.89, in the real world = 0.59). Results in London and Paris were highly similar, and controlling for familiarity with video games did not change the results. The strength of the correlation between real world and virtual environment increased with the difficulty of the virtual wayfinding task, indicating that Sea Hero Quest does not merely capture video gaming skills. The fact that the Sea Hero Quest wayfinding task has real-world ecological validity constitutes a step toward controllable, sensitive, safe, low-cost, and easy to administer digital cognitive assessment of navigation ability.
Highlights
Virtual reality (VR) provides a powerful means to study and quantify how humans navigate, because the properties of a virtual environment can be completely controlled and repeated across participants
We report evidence that wayfinding navigation performance on a mobile app-based VR navigation task (Sea Hero Quest) is significantly correlated with performance in a real-world city street wayfinding task
We found a strong correlation between the distance participants travelled in the video game and in the real-world street network
Summary
Virtual reality (VR) provides a powerful means to study and quantify how humans navigate, because the properties of a virtual environment can be completely controlled and repeated across participants. It has been a critical tool to understanding how brain regions support navigation and unveiling the structural and functional neural correlates
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