Virtual Week: Translation and adaptation for the Italian population

ABSTRACT

The present study adapted a computerised version of Virtual Week, a laboratory measure of prospective memory designed to simulate the kinds of prospective memory tasks encountered in daily life. In particular, this study aimed to translate and adapt Virtual Week for an Italian population. We collected data from 198 subjects that were divided into five groups based on age: young-young adults (20–29 years, n = 47), young adults (30–45 years, n = 32), middle-age adults (46–59 years, n = 32), young-old adults (60–69 years, n = 41), and old-old adults (70 years plus, n = 39). Results showed that PM performance was best in younger adults, relatively stable over middle adulthood and then decreased with age, with older adults performing the least accurately, in particular for the time-based condition. Results also demonstrated good reliability estimates across a range of ages and task types. Thus, the adaptation of Virtual Week into Italian appears to be a reliable measure of prospective memory for the Italian population.

KEYWORDS:

• Prospective memory
• Virtual Week
• Reliability
• Ageing

Acknowledgements

The information in this manuscript and the manuscript itself has never been published either electronically or in print. There are no financial or other relationships that could be interpreted as a conflict of interest affecting this manuscript. This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors. The authors are grateful to Stefano Cardullo for helping with figures and tables editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹There were four testers that included the first author who was very experienced with using Virtual Week and who trained the other testers. Preliminary analyses were conducted to control for the effect of testers on PM performance. No effect of testers was found (p > .05).

²As noted in the introduction, a computerised relatively standard version has been used for some time. However, there have been refinements and the key refinement. It should be noted that the virtual clock is a relatively new feature of ageing studies (e.g., Henry, Rendell, Phillips, et al., 2012; Mioni et al., 2013; Rendell et al., 2011) and clinical studies (Mioni, et al., 2013) using Virtual Week, as well as studies using the Italian version of Virtual Week (Mioni et al., 2012; Mioni et al., 2013; Mioni et al., 2014; Mioni et al., 2015). Earlier versions (such as Rose et al., 2010) had the time of day (consecutive hours of the waking day) marked on the squares on the board, and time-based PM tasks were triggered by passing squares with time marked. As such these tasks were regarded as non-focal event-based tasks (rather than time-based tasks, see Rose et al., 2010).

³Additional analyses were run to assess the relationship between education and PM performance. Significant correlations were found for Virtual Week indices and education, indicating that participants with higher years of education were also more accurate (regular event r = .170, p = .008; regular time r = .450, p < .001; irregular event r = .193, p = .003; irregular time = r = .448, p < .001 and time-check = r = .516, p < .001). Thus, education was entered into the 5 × 5 × 2 × 2 ANOVA as a covariate, and it was found that the critical four-way interaction remained significant, F(16,680) = 2.628, p < .001,  = .059, even when education was controlled for. Thus, education has not been included in further analyses.