Assessing the suitability of virtual reality for psychological testing.

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) is rapidly becoming an inexpensive, mainstream technology. VR technology is superambulatory as it allows participants to be examined under standardized environments and tests anywhere. In addition, it can test participants in different virtual spaces, including environments that are unsafe, inaccessible, costly or difficult to set up, or even nonexistent. We summarize the benefits and potential problems of VR technology, but we also move beyond theoretical approaches and present a customizable, open-source VR system (PSY-VR) that allows scalable psychological testing in modifiable VR environments. This system allows users to modify the environment using a simple graphical interface, without programming expertise. Moreover, as a proof-of-concept, we compare responses in a typical Flanker task between a real laboratory and a painstakingly matched virtual laboratory. Results indicate that the VR responses are comparable to real life testing, demonstrating the utility of VR for psychological assessment studies. The predicted rapid advancement of VR immersive technologies, as well the ease of their integration with physiological metrics ensures that VR-based assessment will be the modus operandi of psychological assessment in the future. This will allow controllable, low-cost assessment on a global scale. Public Significance StatementThis study examines whether virtual reality can be used as a replacement for a controlled testing room in psychological assessment. We also present a virtual reality complete system that researchers can modify and use for their own research purposes. Virtual reality can be used to test multiple groups of people around the world in a controlled and unbiased way.

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Cybernetics Approach to Virtual Emotional Spaces - An electrodermal activity actuated adaptive space

“…VR creates a sense of presence which is an integral component for a system that relies on automatic physiological responses. Roberts et al (2019) suggest that VR tests are comparable to real-life testing, demonstrating the validity of this medium for psychological assessment studies. Additional studies indicate the suitability of using VR for simulating the sense of presence in a corresponding real physical space (Kuliga et al 2015;Maghool et al 2018, Yeom et al 2019.…”

Tracking motor activity in Virtual Reality to reveal cognitive functioning: A preliminary study

“…The task has already been used in a VR (Roberts et al, 2019) in which authors proposed a proof of concept by comparing the performances in VR environment and the usual laboratory situation conditions. They showed that performances were largely equivalent in both situations.…”