Psychometric assessment and behavioral experiments using a free virtual reality platform and computational science

Abstract

BackgroundVirtual Reality has been extensively used in a wide range of psychological experiments. In this study, we aimed to introduce NeuroVirtual 3D, a platform that clinicians could use free of charge.ImplementationThe platform we developed relies on NeuroVR software, but we extended it to apply to experiments. The software is available free of charge to researchers and clinical practitioners who can also use a large number of virtual environments and objects already developed.ResultsThe platform has been developed to connect to virtually every device ever produced by the means of Virtual-Reality Peripheral Network (VRPN) protocols; however, a number of these have already been included and tested in the platform. Among the available devices, the Microsoft Kinect low-cost sensor has already been configured for navigation through the virtual environments and to trigger specific action (sounds, videos, images, and the like) when a specific gesture is recognized, e.g., a step forward or an arm up. A task for neglect and a task for spatial abilities assessment were already implemented within the platform. Moreover, NeuroVirtual 3D integrated a TCP-IP-based module (bridge) to collect the data from virtually any existent biosensor (Thought-Technology, Zephyr and StarStim devices have already been included in the platform). It is able to record any psychophysiological signal during any experiment using also the computed indices in real time.ConclusionsNeuroVirtual 3D is able to record external and internal (e.g., coordinates, keys-press, timestamp) data with a millisecond precision, representing de facto the most advanced technology for experimental psychology using virtual environments available without the needs to program code.

Intrapersonal, interpersonal, and physical space in anorexia nervosa: a virtual reality and repertory grid investigation

“…The participants also had a gamepad (Logitech 940-000114 F510), which allowed them to explore and interact in first person with the virtual environment of a city built around a central square with a tower in the middle (Figure 1), which represents the starting point of the navigation. The virtual city was developed using the software NeuroVirtual 3D (Cipresso et al, 2016;Cipresso et al, 2014), a recent extension of NeuroVR (Riva et al, 2011). This software, commonly used in eating disorder research (Pla-Sanjuanelo et al, 2015;, provides researchers a free VR-platform for customizing a large number of virtual environments already developed, which are useful for the assessment of different cognitive abilities.…”

Virtual Reality for the Assessment of Everyday Cognitive Functions in Older Adults: An Evaluation of the Virtual Reality Action Test and Two Interaction Devices in a 91-Year-Old Woman

“…Virtual reality (VR) technology has recently gained interest as an effective medium for administering different interventions in the context of healthcare Chirico et al, 2016;Indovina et al, 2018). Several observational studies and a small number of controlled studies have found VR to be effective for a variety of health issues (Cipresso et al, 2016). VR also has been proposed to improve clinical assessments, as automated VR systems could dramatically reduce the time required for administration and scoring traditional performancebased assessments without sacrificing ecological validity.…”

SNPPhenA: a corpus for extracting ranked associations of single-nucleotide polymorphisms and phenotypes from literature

“…The large amount of data generated from these studies [4] necessitates the need to develop an automatic approach in order to facilitate the study of the extracted associations. Recently, a few corpora and methods have been developed with the aim of extracting mutation and disease associations from texts such as [5] and [6]. There is, on the other hand, no available corpus for extracting the association of SNP-phenotypes from texts annotated with negation, modality, and the confidence degree of such associations.…”

“…PKDE4J [5] and Dimex [6] are two methods for extracting mutation and disease association, the latter being a rule-based unsupervised mutation-disease association extraction working on the abstract level. The PKDE4J, however, is a supervised method that employs a rich set of rules to detect the used features.…”