Abstract
Distractions found in everyday life can disrupt activities of daily living in older adults. The conflicting evidence related to aging participants' reports of everyday memory functioning and results from traditional paper-and-pencil memory assessments may reflect the limited ecological validity of traditional assessments. The Virtual Environment Grocery Store (VEGS) offers a virtual environment for neuropsychological assessment of episodic memory with real world distractors. This study compares the impact of distractors on VEGS memory performance between 19 older adults and 25 young adults. Results revealed that the older aged group performed significantly worse than the younger aged group on all measures of episodic memory. Moreover, the older aged group performed significantly worse than the younger aged group on prospective memory and all measures of everyday shopping activities. The findings suggest that the VEGS offers a virtual reality-based neuropsychological assessment that can be useful for differentiating between age groups.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 157-161 |
| Number of pages | 5 |
| Journal | Annual Review of CyberTherapy and Telemedicine |
| Volume | 18 |
| State | Published - Jun 1 2020 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Aging
- Episodic memory
- Neuropsychological tests
- Virtual reality
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Neuroscience (miscellaneous)
- Computer Science (miscellaneous)
- Rehabilitation
- Psychology (miscellaneous)