2026-05-19T07:53:17Zhttps://keep.lib.asu.edu/oai/request

oai:keep.lib.asu.edu:node-2014072025-06-10T17:36:41Zoai_pmh:alloai_pmh:repo_items

201407 https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.2.N.201407 http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0 2025-05 61 pages Hart, Juvelyn Hartwell, Leland McClure, Samuel Barrett, The Honors College School of Life Sciences School of Molecular Sciences Accurately assessing cognitive processing in clinical and non-clinical populations remains a challenge, particularly as conventional task-based assessments may not fully capture the complexity of real-world cognitive adaptations. This study investigated the use of an immersive, story-driven cognitive assessment framework that incorporated cognitive challenges into detective-themed narratives to enhance ecological validity, designed to reduce test-related anxiety by presenting cognitive tasks in the form of engaging stories rather than formal assessments. Forty-two participants (21 PTSD, 21 control) completed a series of tasks presented within continuous mystery storylines. Mystery narratives were chosen because they naturally incorporate cognitive demands such as attention allocation, inference-making, memory recall, decision-making under ambiguity, and sequential reasoning. The assessment included a range of cognitive challenges involving reasoning, memory, attention, and decision-making, all integrated within immersive narrative contexts. Behavioral responses, reaction times, and eye-tracking data were collected throughout. Results revealed a statistically significant advantage for PTSD participants in delayed narrative recall during a temporal sequencing task, suggesting more efficient memory anchoring for structured events. In all other tasks, group differences in accuracy and reaction time were non-significant but showed meaningful descriptive trends. PTSD participants exhibited narrowed attentional scanning, heightened sensitivity to emotionally salient details, and variable inhibitory consistency, alongside competitive reasoning performance in ambiguous conditions. These patterns point to the possible use of compensatory cognitive strategies in immersive settings. The findings support the utility of narrative-based cognitive assessment frameworks for examining cognitive processing. While PTSD served as the initial application, the immersive story-driven design developed here offers broader potential for advancing ecological validity in cognitive testing across diverse clinical and research settings. Narrative-based assessment Cognitive Processing Story-driven cognitive tasks Compensatory strategies Immersive cognitive testing Eye-tracking Ecological validity Narrative-Based Cognitive Assessment: A Pilot Study in Individuals with PTSD