Assessment of cognitive flexibility in real life using virtual reality: A comparison of healthy individuals and schizophrenia patients

Authors:
Kiwan Han;In Young Kim;Jae-Jin Kim
Affiliations:
Severance Biomedical Science Institute, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Korea;Department of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University, Korea;Severance Biomedical Science Institute, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Korea and Department of Psychiatry, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Gangnam Severance Hospital, Korea and Inst ...
Venue:
Computers in Biology and Medicine
Year:
2012

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Abstract

To date, cognitive flexibility has been measured only using neuropsychological tasks, and has not been tested using more ecologically valid task due to methodological limitations. In this study, a virtual reality task was developed to evaluate cognitive flexibility in a real life situation and performance on this task was compared between 30 healthy individuals and 30 schizophrenia patients. Compared to healthy controls, a greater number of schizophrenia patients made concrete decisions, and their decision-making times were negatively correlated with the severity of their negative symptoms. These findings indicate that virtual reality can be an ecologically valid measurement of cognitive flexibility.