Investigating the relationship between attentional filtering and memory performance in virtual reality environment

"Experimental research on cognition needs more realistic paradigms to achieve ecological validity as well as to transfer and eventually generalize the results to clinical practice. Selective attention was found to be highly related to memory and training of attentional filtering enhanced memory performance. Moreover, a real memory room might provide a more interesting environment for cognitive training, even though it is very demanding for the examiner to arrange the set-up. Therefore, we developed a change detection task using a virtual reality (VR) environment and compared it with one in a real environment (RE) room. Data of healthy younger and older adults were analyzed regarding their memory and distractor inhibition performance. The results indicate that both test set-ups reveal age effects but only RE in younger adults produces a distractor effect. For younger adults, VR was found to be more challenging as compared to the real room whereas OA performed similar in VR and RE. Technical development like VR becomes more and more attractive to create interesting experimental test settings but their additional value needs to be further investigated."