Assessing social cognition using virtual reality in the neurosurgical context
André Freitas, Débora Velosa, Sofia Ferreira, Sergi Bermúdez i Badia, Ana Lúcia Faria · Procedia Computer Science · 2025
During Awake Brain Surgery (ABS), cognitive functions are monitored with neuropsychological tests during electrical stimulation. Language is the most tested domain. Assessing other higher cognitive functions imposes limitations primarily due to the challenges associated with tailoring neuropsychological tasks to the conditions of awake surgery. Virtual Reality (VR) can combine the realism of stimuli with the experimental control required during cognitive evaluation, offering possibilities to assess other complex cognitive functions, such as social cognition. If not assessed properly, this can lead the affected person to suffer from severe social detachment, while also hindering their capabilities of understanding social interactions or social cues. Within this research, we have adapted a neuropsychological assessment instrument of social cognition - the Edinburgh Social Cognition Test (ESCoT) - to virtual reality (VR), which we have named CogMap for Social Cognition (CogMap-SC). The CogMap-SC was validated with 20 healthy participants who performed both versions in a counterbalanced order. Results showed that 75% of the participants had a higher score on the CogMap-SC, 15% had a better score on the ESCoT task rather than the CogMap-SC and the remaining 10% presented the same scoring on both tasks. We have found a correlation between both versions in the "Intrapersonal understanding of the social norms" domain. The lack of significant correlations in other domains, together with a better performance in the VR version might be related with the implementation differences between both versions. Furthermore, we administered the System Usability Scale (SUS) to the ones that used the VR version, and we obtained very positive scores (average of 90), indicating that the activity is simple to interact.