Enhancing neurocognitive assessment using immersive virtual reality

Immersive virtual reality has significant potential as a tool for enhancing the reliability and specificity of neurocognitive assessment by supporting the ability to carry out carefully controlled, replicable, highly detailed and ecologically valid testing of peoples' ability to perform complex executive functions such as planning and organizing, problem-solving and multitasking, and selective attention and inhibitory control, which are difficult to evaluate using standard paper-and-pencil measures of basic cognitive abilities such as memory, learning, or reasoning. We begin this short paper with an overview of current diagnostic needs in the field of neuropsychology, and a vision of the advantages that immersive virtual reality has the potential to offer as a diagnostic platform. We then briefly summarize our preliminary efforts to develop a robust virtual reality platform for neuropsychological assessment that incorporates a variety of physiological metrics as well as detailed measures of multiple attributes of task performance in a Virtual Environments Grocery Store (VEGS).