Developing and Validating a Virtual Reality Tool for Evaluating Cognitive and Physical Performance during a Simulated Loaded March

Background Athletes, soldiers, and rescue personnel must often perform intense, prolonged, and physically demanding activities while maintaining cognitive focus. As cognitive and physical functions are believed to share central nervous system resources, their simultaneous activation can cause reciprocal disruptions in the performance of both. Methods In the current study, we aimed to develop and validate a virtual reality-based experimental protocol enabling rigorous exploration of the effects of prolonged high-load physical and cognitive efforts, by comparing novel cognitive tasks presented in the context of a simulated loaded march to a battery of established neurocognitive tests. We then used this protocol in a pre-post pilot study exploring the effects of high-load physical and cognitive activity on physical and cognitive performance. Twelve participants underwent a simulated 10-km loaded march on a treadmill in our virtual reality environment, with or without integrated cognitive tasks (VR-COG). At each of three experimental visits, participants underwent pre-activity and post-activity evaluations, including the Color Trail Test, the Synthetic Work Environment (SYNWIN) battery for multitasking evaluation, and physical tests (i.e., ‘time to exhaustion’). Results In general, strong or moderate correlations (r ≥ 0.58 p ≤ 0.048) were found between VR-COG scores and scores on the validated cognitive tests. Together, VR-COG and CTT measures were able to successfully predict the effects of the combined physical and cognitive load on multitasking performance, as assessed by SYNWIN score. Conclusions As virtual environments are ideal for studying high performance professional activity in realistic but controlled settings, the novel protocol is optimal for measuring the effects of prolonged, high-load physical and cognitive activity, and can therefore contribute to our knowledge on physical-cognitive interactions.