Clinical Applications of School Neuropsychology: Clinical Disorders

A company called Nesplora has two CPTs that are administered in virtual reality. Children ages 6–15 can be administered Aula (Climent et al., 2011), which places them in a virtual classroom with a teacher, classmates, and all the furnishings of a classroom. They are asked to respond to some tar- gets that they hear or see on the blackboard and ignore other stimuli, including traditional classroom distractions like peers talking, things happening outside the classroom window, and other students passing notes. Adolescents over the age of 16 and adults can be administered Nesplora’s Aquarium (Climent, 2018), which takes place in a virtual aquarium and has more cognitively demanding and challenging rules for responding to targets that test not only attention but also working memory. Recall that working memory is related to Mirksy’s encode concept, meaning that Aquarium is tap- ping into multiple layers of Mirsky’s attention model. At this point, these are the only commercially available CPTs administered in virtual reality; they have the advantage of modeling real-world atten- tion demands and distractions in a way that is hard to replicate with traditional CPTs administered on desktop and laptop computers.