A novel Virtual Reality grocery shopping task: The impact of virtual human agents on task performance
P. Shahim · Utrecht University Repository (Utrecht University) · 2017
Virtual Reality (VR) has emerged as an ecological valid instrument for assessing everyday cognitive functioning. A key strength of VR lies within its ability to simulate dynamic real-life situations, whereas conventional cognitive tasks do not accurately represent real-life situations. VR tasks are assumed to be more difficult, particularly when distractors are involved. The main objective of the current study was to explore whether the presence of virtual human agents (i.e., third-person avatars) in a novel VR grocery shopping task would result in poorer performance. Healthy participants (n = 68) memorized seven products from a shopping list and were required to subsequently navigate and find them in a virtual supermarket. There were two conditions: one with avatars added to the virtual supermarket (i.e., avatar+) and one without avatars (i.e., avatar-). Both groups were compared regarding their performance on the VR task (i.e., Total time, Total products, False alarms, Interference & Counter). In order to explore the involvement of distinct cognitive subdomains in both conditions, correlations between the VR grocery shopping task outcome measures and conventional cognitive measures were computed (i.e., Trail Making Test A and B, The Rivermead Behavioral Memory Test immediate story recall and WAIS digit span backward). No significant differences between both groups were found with respect to the VR grocery shopping task outcome measures. Likewise, there were no relations between the VR grocery shopping task and measures of working memory and executive functioning. Speed of information processing and short-term memory were found as relevant cognitive aspects of the VR grocery shopping task for both groups. Based on the current study, avatars are not considered as sufficiently distracting. This finding may be attributed to a lack of experimental control regarding the distribution (i.e., timing and location) of the avatars, floor effects and the inclusion of healthy participants.