Road-Crossing Safety in Virtual Reality: A Comparison of Adolescents With and Without ADHD

Abstract

This study investigated the potential accident-proneness of adolescents with AttentionDeficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in a hazardous road-crossing environment. An immersive virtual reality traffic gap-choice task was used to determine whether ADHD adolescents show more unsafe road crossing behavior than controls. Participants (aged 13-17) were identified with (n = 24) or without (n = 24) ADHD according to a standardized protocol (K-SADS-PL and Conners Scales), with equal number of males (n = 12) and females (n = 12) in each group. ADHD adolescents did not take stimulant medication on the day of testing. ADHD participants had a lower margin of safety, walked slower, underutilized the available gap in incoming traffic, showed greater variability in road-crossing behavior and evidenced twice as many collisions as compared to controls. No sex differences were found. Virtual reality may help identify and educate those at higher risk of being involved in dangerous traffic situations.

Attention‐deficit‐hyperactivity disorder increases risk of bone fracture: a population‐based cohort study

“…First, certain behavioural characteristics of these children, such as reckless behaviour, clumsiness, the inability to abide by the rules of games or sports, neglecting to take safety precautions during activities and difficulties in relationships with peers, may contribute to the occurrence of injuries. 21,22 Second, the rate of comorbidity between DCD and ADHD is 50%. 23 The characteristics of DCD make it highly likely that children with DCD are also at greater risk for injury (e.g.…”

Validation of virtual reality as a tool to understand and prevent child pedestrian injury

“…A number of laboratories have experimented with the use of virtual reality to study child pedestrian (Clancy et al, 2006;McComas et al, 2002;Simpson et al, 2003;Thomson et al, 2005) and bicycling safety (Peterson et al, 1994(Peterson et al, , 1995Plumert et al, 2004), but almost all existing research relies on non-immersive virtual environments.…”

“…Initial data from that system targeted developmental change, and found that children delayed their initiation across safe gaps and took longer to cross traffic gaps than adults (Plumert et al, 2004(Plumert et al, , 2005(Plumert et al, , 2007. A second group used a headmounted display VR system to study pediatric pedestrian safety (Clancy et al, 2006;Simpson et al, 2003). Initial work offered some validity of the system by reporting unsafe road-crossings among younger participants and safer behavior by adults (Simpson et al, 2003); later work by a different research team at the same university reported greater risk-taking among a small sample of adolescents with ADHD compared to a matched sample without ADHD (Clancy et al, 2006).…”

“…A second group used a headmounted display VR system to study pediatric pedestrian safety (Clancy et al, 2006;Simpson et al, 2003). Initial work offered some validity of the system by reporting unsafe road-crossings among younger participants and safer behavior by adults (Simpson et al, 2003); later work by a different research team at the same university reported greater risk-taking among a small sample of adolescents with ADHD compared to a matched sample without ADHD (Clancy et al, 2006).…”

A Controlled Clinical Comparison of Attention Performance in Children with ADHD in a Virtual Reality Classroom Compared to Standard Neuropsychological Methods

“…The capacity of VR to create dynamic, immersive three-dimensional stimulus environments, in which all behavioral responding can be recorded, offers assessment and rehabilitation options that are not available using traditional assessment methods. In this regard, VR applications are now being developed and tested which focus on component cognitive processes including: attention processes (Cho et al, 2002a;Clancy et al, 2006), spatial abilities (Baumgartner et al, 2006;Burgess et al, 2006;McClusky et al, 2005;Pani et al, 2005;Parsons et al, 2004;Wolbers et al, 2004), memory (Brooks & Rose, 2003;Brooks et al, 2004;Burgess et al, 2006;Parslow et al, 2005;Phelps et al, 2004), and executive functions (Baumgartner et al, 2006;Elkind et al, 2001;Morganti, 2004).…”