Psychosocial Characteristics and Objective Performance in Immersive Virtual Reality: Associations of Social Support, Psychological Distress, and Education with Psychomotor Speed and Cognitive Flexibility
Abstract
Immersive virtual reality (VR) can quantify cognitive and psychomotor performance, but interpreting its scores requires establishing whether they also vary with psychosocial characteristics. This study examined associations of perceived support, psychological distress, and education with immersive performance across adulthood, including whether support associations differed by interaction mode, age, or education. Two hundred and two adults aged 19–90 years completed a five-mode VR Fitts' law task, the Trail Making Test in VR (TMT-VR), the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, and the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales. Hierarchical mixed-effects models retained the repeated task structure; multiplicity-controlled exploratory analyses examined the complete 26-variable TMT-VR battery and focused moderation tests. In the Fitts task, distress showed no clear association with task time or the application-defined Accuracy Index, and education added no independent task-time association beyond age. Higher support accompanied slightly slower adjusted task times, opposite to expectation, without supported differences by mode, age, or education. In TMT-VR, age and Part were the principal correlates of completion time. Support, distress, and education did not show broad associations with completion time, wrong-target errors, or error-adjusted time after multiplicity correction. One exploratory association survived correction: participants reporting more support showed a smaller increase in wrong-target errors from Part A to Part B, with no difference in overall error level. Distress was unrelated to every TMT-VR outcome after correction, including the application-defined mean selection distance. Within this generally high-support, low-symptom sample, psychosocial differences between participants were therefore not consistent correlates of conventional immersive cognitive outcomes. This finding informs the interpretation of non-clinical assessments without implying that support or distress is unimportant within an individual. Longitudinal studies should test whether changes in a person's psychosocial circumstances accompany cognitive change during healthy ageing or cognitive vulnerability. The support association with the Part B minus Part A error increment shows how a contrast between task demands can carry information that neither the overall error level nor completion time captures; it is exploratory and requires replication.
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BibTeX
@misc{kourtesis2026psychosocial,
title = {{Psychosocial Characteristics and Objective Performance in Immersive Virtual Reality: Associations of Social Support, Psychological Distress, and Education with Psychomotor Speed and Cognitive Flexibility}},
author = {Panagiotis Kourtesis and Lydia Asimakopoulou and Katerina Denaxa and Maria Roussou and Petros Roussos},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/pvgbk_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/pvgbk_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Psychosocial Characteristics and Objective Performance in Immersive Virtual Reality: Associations of Social Support, Psychological Distress, and Education with Psychomotor Speed and Cognitive Flexibility
AU - Panagiotis Kourtesis
AU - Lydia Asimakopoulou
AU - Katerina Denaxa
AU - Maria Roussou
AU - Petros Roussos
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/19
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/pvgbk_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/pvgbk_v1/
AB - Immersive virtual reality (VR) can quantify cognitive and psychomotor performance, but interpreting its scores requires establishing whether they also vary with psychosocial characteristics. This study examined associations of perceived support, psychological distress, and education with immersive performance across adulthood, including whether support associations differed by interaction mode, age, or education. Two hundred and two adults aged 19–90 years completed a five-mode VR Fitts' law task, the Trail Making Test in VR (TMT-VR), the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, and the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales. Hierarchical mixed-effects models retained the repeated task structure; multiplicity-controlled exploratory analyses examined the complete 26-variable TMT-VR battery and focused moderation tests. In the Fitts task, distress showed no clear association with task time or the application-defined Accuracy Index, and education added no independent task-time association beyond age. Higher support accompanied slightly slower adjusted task times, opposite to expectation, without supported differences by mode, age, or education. In TMT-VR, age and Part were the principal correlates of completion time. Support, distress, and education did not show broad associations with completion time, wrong-target errors, or error-adjusted time after multiplicity correction. One exploratory association survived correction: participants reporting more support showed a smaller increase in wrong-target errors from Part A to Part B, with no difference in overall error level. Distress was unrelated to every TMT-VR outcome after correction, including the application-defined mean selection distance. Within this generally high-support, low-symptom sample, psychosocial differences between participants were therefore not consistent correlates of conventional immersive cognitive outcomes. This finding informs the interpretation of non-clinical assessments without implying that support or distress is unimportant within an individual. Longitudinal studies should test whether changes in a person's psychosocial circumstances accompany cognitive change during healthy ageing or cognitive vulnerability. The support association with the Part B minus Part A error increment shows how a contrast between task demands can carry information that neither the overall error level nor completion time captures; it is exploratory and requires replication.
ER -