Evaluación de memoria espacial por medio de realidad virtual: Estudio de caso con una aplicación utilizada en seres humanos basada en el laberinto de Morris

Abstract

Context: Remembering and learning are one of the most important things for the brain, spatial memory is related to the capability to acquire and hold associations of what is in the environment. Unfortunately, some factors like age, drugs, and mental illnesses, among others, makes to lose this capability of remembering things or events that happens, that includes spatial memory, and for humans there are not so many ways to evaluate it. One test to determine various parameters of spatial memory is called ‘’Morris Water Maze’, that test has been applied in most of their cases in animals, specifically in rats.Virtual reality is a technology that has taken importance in psychology, medicine and other areas different than entertainment. It has highlighted because users of this technology can experiment different interaction with different objects in a virtual world. One of the most powerful advantages of VR is that people does not have to be submitted to exhaustive tests.Objective: This work presents a mobile application capable to evaluate spatial memory on humans through virtual reality, and based on Morris water maze which it is a process frequently used on little mammals like rats. It uses video games techniques and engines to create the virtual maze as well as the way the user interacts whit it. The objective of this application is to show an alternative to evaluate spatial memory on humans with low cost materials, virtual reality and mobile (cellphone) techniques.Method: To develop the proposal of an application based in the Morris water maze and that uses virtual reality, it is considered the next two key elements: 1) development environment: this project uses Unity (Game Engine) because of its documentation, develop community, its capability to be multi-platform, its cost and because it can be used with VR. 2) Dispositive to display the virtual world or head mounted display, due to their capability to cover the eyes of the user and make him be part of the virtual world. This project uses Google cardboard because of its low price and its versatility to use in almost any platform and phone, making it mobile, the mobile operating system “android” is also fully compatible with unity.Results: For the experimental section of the project an agreement was reached with a high school in the city of Guadalajara Mexico (High School number 40 “José Clemente Orozco”). The tests were applied to 18 high school students, 9 boys and 9 girls. In addition, high school teachers made the decision to choose students with the highest grades and those with the lowest grades, in this way, make a comparison between them. There were 10 students with high scores and 8 with low scores in their subjects and school activities.Through the whole procedure applied to the students was not detected neither anomaly that could block the performance of the students. The VR application works correctly both in display the virtual world and in the collection of the user data. At the end of the tests both groups memorized their environment (virtual space), and they were pretty close each other in their performance, showing a healthy spatial memory. There is no difference between both groups, all the participants memorized their virtual environment and with every test they kept improving on their times and distances. At the end, both groups were pretty close.Conclusion: The conclusion of the present project remains on the importance of virtual environments and VR to diagnose or help with diverse psychological or medical illnesses. In this project there is no difference between groups of students, but found that they could use their spatial memory on the VR application presented in this work paper (fulfilling the initial objective) improving their times and distances even when they were change them from their start position or when put some distractions to the environment. The VR application will be enhanced for future investigations in different opportunity areas.Keywords: Spatial Memory; Virtual Reality; Morris Water Maze;