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Record W4415700416 · doi:10.1037/tmb0000159

Social cognition assessment using virtual reality: A systematic review.

2025· article· en· W4415700416 on OpenAlexfundno aff
Erika Neveu, Lara-Kim Huynh, Isabelle Roy, Julia Salles, Gardy A. Lavertu, Hamza Zarglayoun, Philippe Dodin, Miriam H. Beauchamp

Bibliographic record

VenueTechnology Mind and Behavior · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicVirtual Reality Applications and Impacts
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaCanadian Institutes of Health Research
KeywordsSocial cognitionCognitionSocial cognitive theoryAttributionMotor cognitionAutismSocial competence

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Social cognition refers to the abilities that allow us to perceive, process, and respond to others’ behaviors and emotions. Technological advancements in virtual reality (VR) support its potential for evaluating social cognition and addressing limitations of traditional psychometric measures. A systematic review was conducted to document VR tasks that have been used to study social cognition. An inventory of these tasks is provided along with detailed information on study, participant, assessment tool, and technological characteristics. Challenges and limitations associated with these tools are discussed to inform future directions for using VR for social cognition. Embase, APA PsycInfo, PubMed, Web of Science, and Cochrane Library were queried using relevant keywords. Articles were screened for eligibility according to the Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcomes, and Study design criteria. The data extraction table was developed from relevant literature. Two reviewers performed screening and extraction steps independently, and disagreements were resolved by a third independent reviewer. Sixty-six studies were included, covering 59 unique VR tools assessing social cognition in the following areas: emotion processing, social perception, moral reasoning, theory of mind, empathy, and attribution style. Most paradigms targeted emotion processing. Autism and schizophrenia were the most studied clinical conditions. Important issues identified through the review included challenges associated with cultural adaptations and limited psychometric data. Numerous options are available to study social cognition using VR, but most focus on lower order sociocognitive abilities (e.g., emotion processing), and future work should seek to develop stimuli or environments that can target more complex skills and can accommodate greater diversity for cross-cultural use.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.561
Threshold uncertainty score0.320

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.045
GPT teacher head0.386
Teacher spread0.341 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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