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Virtual reality as a tool for assessing episodic memory

Published: 27 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The principal attraction of virtual reality is its potential to create experiments close to daily life with perfect experimental control. We performed an experiment in a virtual town in order to develop a better episodic memory assessment. We tested all components of episodic memory. Young and elderly adults participated in the virtual test: they were either in an active exploration or in a passive exploration of the town. The results showed that older persons recalled the spatiotemporal context and the details of the events in a lower proportion compared to younger ones regardless of the active or passive condition. But no difference was found between active and passive exploration in measures of episodic memory. Finally, correlations mainly appeared between memory complaint and virtual scores, but not with a classical verbal episodic memory test. The virtual test seems to allow a better assessment of episodic memory compared to classical studies, especially because of its components of spatiotemporal memory assessment. In conclusion, virtual reality appears to offer the possibility of developing neuropsychological tools closer to the daily life of patients.

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  • (2023)The immersive virtual memory task: Assessing object-location memory in neurological patients using immersive virtual realityNeuropsychological Rehabilitation10.1080/09602011.2023.225695734:6(870-898)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2023
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cover image ACM Conferences
VRST '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technology
October 2008
288 pages
ISBN:9781595939517
DOI:10.1145/1450579
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 27 October 2008

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Author Tags

  1. action
  2. ageing
  3. episodic memory
  4. virtual reality

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VRST08

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VRST '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 12 of 68 submissions, 18%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 66 of 254 submissions, 26%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Serious Games and the Cognitive Screening of Community-Dwelling Older Adults: A Systematic ReviewInformation Systems and Technologies10.1007/978-3-031-45648-0_39(397-408)Online publication date: 14-Feb-2024
  • (2023)The influence of music liking on episodic memory for rich spatiotemporal contextsMemory10.1080/09658211.2022.215436731:5(589-604)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2023
  • (2023)The immersive virtual memory task: Assessing object-location memory in neurological patients using immersive virtual realityNeuropsychological Rehabilitation10.1080/09602011.2023.225695734:6(870-898)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2023
  • (2023)Virtual Reality and the Cognitive Screening of Older Adults: A ReviewInformation Technology and Systems10.1007/978-3-031-33261-6_36(419-430)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2023
  • (2021)A Virtual Reality Memory Palace Variant Aids Knowledge Retrieval from Scholarly ArticlesIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2020.300900327:12(4359-4373)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2021
  • (2018)New Trends in Episodic Memory Assessment: Immersive 360° Ecological VideosFrontiers in Psychology10.3389/fpsyg.2018.018789Online publication date: 2-Oct-2018
  • (2016)How does intentionality of encoding affect memory for episodic information?Learning & Memory10.1101/lm.041491.11523:11(648-659)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2016
  • (2010)Do humans use episodic memory to solve a What-Where-When memory task?Animal Cognition10.1007/s10071-010-0346-514:1(95-102)Online publication date: 27-Jul-2010

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