EPELI: a novel virtual reality task for the assessment of goal-directed behavior in real-life contexts.

A recently developed virtual reality task, EPELI (Executive Performance in Everyday LIving), quantifies goal-directed behavior in naturalistic conditions. Participants navigate a virtual apartment, performing household chores given by a virtual character. EPELI aims to tap attention, executive function, and prospective memory. To ensure its applicability to further research and clinical work and to study its relationship to relevant background factors, we examined several key properties of EPELI in 77 typically developing 9-13-year-old children. These included EPELI's internal consistency, age and gender differences, sensitivity to gaming experience, head-mounted display (HMD) type, and verbal recall ability, as well as its relationships with parent-rated everyday executive problems. Of the eight EPELI measures, the following six showed acceptable internal consistency: task and navigation efficacy, number of correctly performed tasks and overall actions, time monitoring, and controller movement. Some measures were associated with age, gender, or verbal encoding ability. Moreover, EPELI performance was associated with parent-rated everyday executive problems. There were no significant associations of gaming background, task familiarity, or HMD type with the EPELI measures. These results attest to the reliability and ecological validity of this new virtual reality tool for the assessment of attention, executive functions, and prospective memory in children.

Eye movement behavior in a real-world virtual reality task reveals ADHD in children.

Eye movements and other rich data obtained in virtual reality (VR) environments resembling situations where symptoms are manifested could help in the objective detection of various symptoms in clinical conditions. In the present study, 37 children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and 36 typically developing controls (9-13 y.o) played a lifelike prospective memory game using head-mounted display with inbuilt 90 Hz eye tracker. Eye movement patterns had prominent group differences, but they were dispersed across the full performance time rather than associated with specific events or stimulus features. A support vector machine classifier trained on eye movement data showed excellent discrimination ability with 0.92 area under curve, which was significantly higher than for task performance measures or for eye movements obtained in a visual search task. We demonstrated that a naturalistic VR task combined with eye tracking allows accurate prediction of attention deficits, paving the way for precision diagnostics.

Quantifying ADHD Symptoms in Open-Ended Everyday Life Contexts With a New Virtual Reality Task.

OBJECTIVE: To quantify goal-directed behavior and ADHD symptoms in naturalistic conditions, we developed a virtual reality task, EPELI (Executive Performance in Everyday LIving), and tested its predictive, discriminant and concurrent validity. METHOD: We collected EPELI data, conventional neuropsychological task data, and parent-ratings of executive problems and symptoms in 38 ADHD children and 38 typically developing controls. RESULTS: EPELI showed predictive validity as the ADHD group exhibited higher percentage of irrelevant actions reflecting lower attentional-executive efficacy and more controller movements and total game actions, both indicative of hyperactivity-impulsivity. Further, the five combined EPELI measures showed excellent discriminant validity (area under curve 88 %), while the correlations of the EPELI efficacy measure with parent-rated executive problems (r = .57) and ADHD symptoms (r = .55) pointed to its concurrent validity. CONCLUSION: We provide a proof-of-concept validation for a new virtual reality tool for ecologically valid assessment of ADHD symptoms.

The Nature and Nurture of Melody: A Twin Study of Musical Pitch and Rhythm Perception.

Both genetic and environmental factors are known to play a role in our ability to perceive music, but the degree to which they influence different aspects of music cognition is still unclear. We investigated the relative contribution of genetic and environmental effects on melody perception in 384 young adult twins [69 full monozygotic (MZ) twin pairs, 44 full dizygotic (DZ) twin pairs, 70 MZ twins without a co-twin, and 88 DZ twins without a co-twin]. The participants performed three online music tests requiring the detection of pitch changes in a two-melody comparison task (Scale) and key and rhythm incongruities in single-melody perception tasks (Out-of-key, Off-beat). The results showed predominantly additive genetic effects in the Scale task (58 %, 95 % CI 42-70 %), shared environmental effects in the Out-of-key task (61 %, 49-70 %), and non-shared environmental effects in the Off-beat task (82 %, 61-100 %). This highly different pattern of effects suggests that the contribution of genetic and environmental factors on music perception depends on the degree to which it calls for acquired knowledge of musical tonal and metric structures.