Performance
How do accuracy, response timing and errors change as task and environmental demands increase?
← Selected research
Doctoral research · Ulster University
Neuroadaptive XR
Studying working memory through adaptive VR tasks.
The platform combines cognitive assessment and training with behavioural, eye-tracking, EEG and ECG recordings.
About the research ↓
01 / Question & contribution
When should a task change its difficulty?
The same task can place different demands on different people. My research examines those differences in visuospatial working memory and attention.
I ask how performance changes with task and environmental demands, and whether physiological recordings offer useful information beyond previous behaviour and task difficulty.
Within my PhD, I design the cognitive tasks and virtual environments, implement behavioural adaptation in Unity, and develop the recording and analysis workflows connecting a session to its individual trials.
02 / Participant experience
The session.
Assessment establishes a behavioural profile; training then varies the challenge across tasks.
- 01
Baseline & setup
Equipment setup and baseline recording.
- 02
Assessment
Reaction-time, spatial-sequence and N-back tasks.
- 03
Breathing & recovery
A guided breathing phase before training.
- 04
Adaptive training
Eight stages covering visual attention, tracking, spatial sequences and updating.
Training tasks include visual search, target–lure discrimination, change localisation, motion perception, multiple-object tracking, forward and reverse spatial sequences, and spatial N-back.
03 / Evaluation & related work
What the study tests.
The planned evaluation follows participants across three sessions, keeping task performance, progress over time and independent transfer distinct.
Additional information
Do aligned, quality-controlled EEG and ECG features improve prediction beyond behaviour and task difficulty?
Training & transfer
How should adaptive and fixed training be compared, and does change extend to an independent assessment?