Detecting allocentric and egocentric navigation deficits in patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder using virtual reality

ABSTRACT

Present evidence suggests that the use of virtual reality has great advantages in evaluating visuospatial navigation and memory for the diagnosis of psychiatric or other neurological disorders. There are a few virtual reality studies on allocentric and egocentric memories in schizophrenia, but studies on both memories in bipolar disorder are lacking. The objective of this study was to compare the performance of allocentric and egocentric memories in patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. For this resolve, an advanced virtual reality navigation task (VRNT) was presented to distinguish the navigational performances of these patients. Twenty subjects with schizophrenia and 20 bipolar disorder patients were compared with 20 healthy-matched controls on the newly developed VRNT consisting of a virtual neighbourhood (allocentric memory) and a virtual maze (egocentric memory). The results demonstrated that schizophrenia patients were significantly impaired on all allocentric, egocentric, visual, and verbal memory tasks compared with patients with bipolar disorder and normal subjects. Dissimilarly, the performance of patients with bipolar disorder was slightly lower than that of control subjects in all these abilities, but no significant differences were observed. It was concluded that allocentric and egocentric navigation deficits are detectable in patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder using VRNT, and this task along with RAVLT and ROCFT can be used as a valid clinical tool for distinguishing these patients from normal subjects.

KEYWORDS:

• Schizophrenia
• Cognitive impairments
• Allocentric
• Egocentric
• Virtual reality

Acknowledgements

We express our appreciations to the subjects who participated in this study. There are no competing financial interests. All authors had complete access to all of the data in the study and take responsibility for the integrity of the data and the truth of the data analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Alireza Mohammadi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1004-5339

Additional information

Funding

This research has been supported by the Neuroscience Research Center, Baqiyatallah University of Medical Sciences, grant no. 950718.