Abstract
Individual mobility in everyday life requires processing of information about potential paths and their costs and benefits, all while keeping track of limited resources such as time and energy. HeiAge-VR is an academic Virtual Reality (VR) game that simulates individual mobility as a series of risky choices between different paths. The game features urban and nature contexts and allows the assessment of decision-behavior of mobility-impaired and unimpaired participants. In this paper, we describe the development of the game and results of its pilot testing in a group of young and healthy participants (N = 20) compared with a group of old, partly frail participants (N = 20). In the pilot test, decisions in the game were not associated with self-reported risk- taking and if-then planning but with whether the decision-relevant path parameters were shown to the participants or not.
Trial-based analysis suggested that expected utility reasoning was relevant for the management of energy costs, but only when the parameters were not known to the participants. For time resources, response patterns suggested violations of maximizing expected utility with participants not choosing optimal paths, regardless of whether parameters were shown or not. Overall, the pilot test showed that the game could be completed by participants with different age and frailty levels. However, self-reports and participants’ choices in the game raised some concerns regarding the face validity of the current path parameters. These parameters can be freely adapted so that face validity can be increased for futures studies.