Assessing stroke patients’ prospective memory using virtual reality

Abstract

There is a dearth of empirical evidence about prospective memory (remembering to perform actions in the future) in stroke patients. A probable reason for this is that it is difficult to perform a realistic and controlled assessment of prospective memory ability in a rehabilitation setting. Virtual reality may provide a solution to this difficulty by allowing prospective memory to be tested in a simulation of a real-life situation whilst retaining a laboratory level of scientific control. This exploratory study assessed the performance of stroke patients and age-matched control participants on event-, time- and activity-based prospective memory retrieval tasks in a personal computer-based virtual environment. Stroke patients were severely impaired at the event- and activity-based tasks compared with age-matched controls, but only marginally impaired at the time-based task. The additional knowledge gained from this form of assessment could direct rehabilitation more effectively towards specific impairments of individual patients.

A Comparison of Social (Weekend) Smokers, Regular (Daily) Smokers and a Never-Smoked Group Upon Everyday Prospective Memory

“…Also, the reliability of the PRVP (Cronbach's alpha level =.68) is modest. In addition, we found no relationship between the performance on PRVP and the NART, although memory would normally be expected to correlate with IQ [see 29]. The fact that we replicated the previous finding despite using a potentially weak measure, makes the results more noteworthy, but it also suggests that further studies are needed and some caution needs to be exercised in interpreting our findings.…”

“…anxiety, depression) can interact with drug use upon cognition and memory [27] and that mood has been shown to influence PM directly [28], this was also measured and its relationship to the main PM was analysed. Finally, variations in IQ were measured since this good performance on IQ (using the National Adult Reading Test) correlates well with good PM performance [29].…”

Location-based prospective memory

“…2. Although many studies of prospective memory collectively have accuracy levels ranging from 20%-80% (e.g., Ball, Knight, Dewitt, & Brewer, 2013;Brooks, Rose, Potter, Jayawardena, & Morling, 2004;Einstein, Holland, McDaniel, & Guynn, 1992;Einstein & McDaniel, 1990;Knight, Nicholls, & Titov, 2008), there are also multiple studies reporting performance at or near ceiling (e.g., Ball et al, 2013;Groot, Wilson, Evans, & Watson, 2002;Kalpouzos, Eriksson, Sjolie, Molin, & Nyberg, 2010;McBride, Beckner, & Abney, 2011). This often reflects difficulty level.…”

Multitasking and Prospective Memory: Can Virtual Reality be Useful for Diagnosis?

“…One of the major plusses of VR is its capacity to bring the real world into a labora-tory setting thus permitting the control of stimuli and the recording of the patient's answers and behaviours. Over time, some experiments which have used VR technology have demonstrated its ecological validity and its capacity to detect planning or prospective memory deficit [2,7,9].…”