Assessing stroke patients' ability to remember to perform actions in the future using virtual reality

Difficulties in assessing prospective memory (remembering to perform actions in the future) have contributed to a dearth of empirical evidence as to whether stroke patients are impaired at prospective memory tasks. A virtual environment was used to assess stroke patients’ and agematched control participants’ performance of realistic event-based, time-based and activitybased prospective memory tasks. Stroke patients were impaired compared to controls at all the prospective memory tasks, but less impaired at the time-based task. Their prospective memory was more impaired than their retrospective memory, assessed by a free recall test. These results will be useful in directing future stroke rehabilitation strategies to focus on specific memory impairments.