Virtuleap neuroscientist co-authors Frontiers article on cognitive decline

Figure 1. Networking and collaboration among different stakeholders: a fundamental chain in the improvement and identification of new preventive strategies, diagnostic tools, and effective treatments against dementia.

Today, an article published on Frontiers, entitled “Intercepting Dementia: Awareness and Innovation as Key Tools”, was co-authored by Virtuleap neuroscientist, Victòria Brugada-Ramentol, Ph.D.. It describes the need to introduce novel screening measures like VR to prevent and even potentially revert cognitive decline:

“VR systems are rapidly gaining attention for their application in assessing cognitive training tasks, since, compared to screen-based tools, portable VR devices provide a simultaneous and more complete array on different sensory stimulations, including visual and auditory inputs or locomotor activity (Sánchez-Vives and Slater, 2005), therefore offering a real-time readout on multiple cerebral functions (Zygouris et al., 2017).”

“In addition, their acceptance can be higher due to low obtrusiveness, engaging design, and gamified configuration (Kaufman et al., 2016; Zygouris et al., 2017; Mandryk and Birk, 2019), as some evidence points towards the benefits of gamified scenarios in improving specific cognitive aspects (Anguera et al., 2013). VR environments provide ecologically valid scenarios, which at the same time offer the possibility to control experimental variables (Bohil et al., 2011).”

“Furthermore, VR has already proven useful in the field of neurorehabilitation (Pérez-Marcos et al., 2018). Altogether, these observations suggest that cognitive testing through VR could give a complete and naturalistic setting to test for long-term cognitive changes. For instance, it has been proposed that digital biomarkers extracted from gameplay could reflect the user’s cognitive status (Gielis et al., 2021).”

Click here to read the full article.