Development of the Virtual Kitchen Protocol for Prospective Memory: a virtual reality-based measure of everyday prospective memory abilities.

INTRODUCTION: Prospective memory is the ability to remember to accomplish a task at a specified point in the future. While this cognitive ability has a large impact on daily functioning, it is rarely assessed during neuropsychological evaluations. Furthermore, existing clinical prospective memory measures are few in number and have significant limitations, including applicability to everyday functioning and appropriate norming for older adulthood. There are also many gaps in the literature on prospective memory, such as how environmental factors affect performance across the lifespan.

METHOD: In the current study, we develop and establish a new virtual reality-based measure of prospective memory, the Virtual Kitchen Protocol for Prospective Memory. Young adults (ages 18-29; n  = 56), healthy older adults (ages 60-90; n  = 94), and clinical older adults (ages 62-90; n  = 30) were compared on their performances on both the developed virtual reality prospective memory test and a parallel paper-and-pencil prospective memory test to investigate the impact of test environment across participant group.

RESULTS: The Virtual Kitchen Protocol for Prospective Memory was found to adequately differentiate between young adult, healthy older adult, and clinical older adult populations - suggesting baseline ability for prospective memory assessment in clinical settings with older adults and potential for future improvement of neuropsychological evaluations. Additionally, the developed virtual prospective memory task appeared to mimic environmental factors in everyday life but did not replicate the benefit previously measured in healthy older adults' prospective memory ability in naturalistic settings.

CONCLUSIONS: Overall, the current study built upon extant knowledge of prospective memory in both normal and abnormal aging, suggesting future directions in replicating familiar home environments. Findings provided additional evidence toward future validation of virtual reality assessment tools in clinical neuropsychological evaluations of cognitive abilities, such as prospective memory, with both healthy and clinical older adult populations.