Reliability assessment of temporal discounting measures in virtual reality environments

Abstract In recent years the emergence of high-performance virtual reality (VR) technology has opened up new possibilities for the examination of context effects in psychological studies. The opportunity to create ecologically valid stimulation in a highly controlled lab environment is especially re...

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Autores principales:	Luca R. Bruder, Lisa Scharer, Jan Peters
Formato:	article
Lenguaje:	EN
Publicado:	Nature Portfolio 2021
Materias:	Medicine R Science Q
Acceso en línea:	https://doaj.org/article/a95028f6228e4a78937899a54ff01969
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spelling	oai:doaj.org-article:a95028f6228e4a78937899a54ff019692021-12-02T14:25:21ZReliability assessment of temporal discounting measures in virtual reality environments10.1038/s41598-021-86388-82045-2322https://doaj.org/article/a95028f6228e4a78937899a54ff019692021-03-01T00:00:00Zhttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-86388-8https://doaj.org/toc/2045-2322Abstract In recent years the emergence of high-performance virtual reality (VR) technology has opened up new possibilities for the examination of context effects in psychological studies. The opportunity to create ecologically valid stimulation in a highly controlled lab environment is especially relevant for studies of psychiatric disorders, where it can be problematic to confront participants with certain stimuli in real life. However, before VR can be confidently applied widely it is important to establish that commonly used behavioral tasks generate reliable data within a VR surrounding. One field of research that could benefit greatly from VR-applications are studies assessing the reactivity to addiction related cues (cue-reactivity) in participants suffering from gambling disorder. Here we tested the reliability of a commonly used temporal discounting task in a novel VR set-up designed for the concurrent assessment of behavioral and psychophysiological cue-reactivity in gambling disorder. On 2 days, thirty-four healthy non-gambling participants explored two rich and navigable VR-environments (neutral: café vs. gambling-related: casino and sports-betting facility), while their electrodermal activity was measured using remote sensors. In addition, participants completed the temporal discounting task implemented in each VR environment. On a third day, participants performed the task in a standard lab testing context. We then used comprehensive computational modeling using both standard softmax and drift diffusion model (DDM) choice rules to assess the reliability of discounting model parameters assessed in VR. Test–retest reliability estimates were good to excellent for the discount rate log(k), whereas they were poor to moderate for additional DDM parameters. Differences in model parameters between standard lab testing and VR, reflecting reactivity to the different environments, were mostly numerically small and of inconclusive directionality. Finally, while exposure to VR generally increased tonic skin conductance, this effect was not modulated by the neutral versus gambling-related VR-environment. Taken together this proof-of-concept study in non-gambling participants demonstrates that temporal discounting measures obtained in VR are reliable, suggesting that VR is a promising tool for applications in computational psychiatry, including studies on cue-reactivity in addiction.Luca R. BruderLisa ScharerJan PetersNature PortfolioarticleMedicineRScienceQENScientific Reports, Vol 11, Iss 1, Pp 1-16 (2021)
institution	DOAJ
collection	DOAJ
language	EN
topic	Medicine R Science Q
spellingShingle	Medicine R Science Q Luca R. Bruder Lisa Scharer Jan Peters Reliability assessment of temporal discounting measures in virtual reality environments
description	Abstract In recent years the emergence of high-performance virtual reality (VR) technology has opened up new possibilities for the examination of context effects in psychological studies. The opportunity to create ecologically valid stimulation in a highly controlled lab environment is especially relevant for studies of psychiatric disorders, where it can be problematic to confront participants with certain stimuli in real life. However, before VR can be confidently applied widely it is important to establish that commonly used behavioral tasks generate reliable data within a VR surrounding. One field of research that could benefit greatly from VR-applications are studies assessing the reactivity to addiction related cues (cue-reactivity) in participants suffering from gambling disorder. Here we tested the reliability of a commonly used temporal discounting task in a novel VR set-up designed for the concurrent assessment of behavioral and psychophysiological cue-reactivity in gambling disorder. On 2 days, thirty-four healthy non-gambling participants explored two rich and navigable VR-environments (neutral: café vs. gambling-related: casino and sports-betting facility), while their electrodermal activity was measured using remote sensors. In addition, participants completed the temporal discounting task implemented in each VR environment. On a third day, participants performed the task in a standard lab testing context. We then used comprehensive computational modeling using both standard softmax and drift diffusion model (DDM) choice rules to assess the reliability of discounting model parameters assessed in VR. Test–retest reliability estimates were good to excellent for the discount rate log(k), whereas they were poor to moderate for additional DDM parameters. Differences in model parameters between standard lab testing and VR, reflecting reactivity to the different environments, were mostly numerically small and of inconclusive directionality. Finally, while exposure to VR generally increased tonic skin conductance, this effect was not modulated by the neutral versus gambling-related VR-environment. Taken together this proof-of-concept study in non-gambling participants demonstrates that temporal discounting measures obtained in VR are reliable, suggesting that VR is a promising tool for applications in computational psychiatry, including studies on cue-reactivity in addiction.
format	article
author	Luca R. Bruder Lisa Scharer Jan Peters
author_facet	Luca R. Bruder Lisa Scharer Jan Peters
author_sort	Luca R. Bruder
title	Reliability assessment of temporal discounting measures in virtual reality environments
title_short	Reliability assessment of temporal discounting measures in virtual reality environments
title_full	Reliability assessment of temporal discounting measures in virtual reality environments
title_fullStr	Reliability assessment of temporal discounting measures in virtual reality environments
title_full_unstemmed	Reliability assessment of temporal discounting measures in virtual reality environments
title_sort	reliability assessment of temporal discounting measures in virtual reality environments
publisher	Nature Portfolio
publishDate	2021
url	https://doaj.org/article/a95028f6228e4a78937899a54ff01969
work_keys_str_mv	AT lucarbruder reliabilityassessmentoftemporaldiscountingmeasuresinvirtualrealityenvironments AT lisascharer reliabilityassessmentoftemporaldiscountingmeasuresinvirtualrealityenvironments AT janpeters reliabilityassessmentoftemporaldiscountingmeasuresinvirtualrealityenvironments
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Reliability assessment of temporal discounting measures in virtual reality environments

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