Lukáš Hejtmánek

The Czech Academy of Sciences | AVCR · Institute of Psychology

There is a vibrant debate about consequences of mobile devices on our cognitive capabilities. Use of technology guided navigation has been linked with poor spatial knowledge and wayfinding in both virtual and real world experiments. Our goal was to investigate how the attention people pay to the GPS aid influences their navigation performance. We d...

Past studies suggest that learning a spatial environment by navigating on a desktop computer can lead to significant acquisition of spatial knowledge, although typically less than navigating in the real world. Exactly how this might differ when learning in immersive virtual interfaces that offer a rich set of multisensory cues remains to be fully e...

Path integration is thought to rely on vestibular and proprioceptive cues yet most studies in humans involve primarily visual input, providing limited insight into their respective contributions. We developed a paradigm involving walking in an omnidirectional treadmill in which participants were guided on two sides of a triangle and then found thei...

Virtuální realita poskytuje kontrolované a imerzivní prostředí a nabízí tak možnost vytvářet ekologicky validní stimuly v prostředí s vysokou mírou prezence. V psychologických vědách se používá od počátku 90. let a v psychiatrii se objevuje jako nástroj léčby fobií těsně poté. Od té doby zažila virtuální realita značný technologický pokrok a vzhled...

BACKGROUND Over the past 25 years, the development of multi-user applications has seen significant advancements and challenges. The technological development in this field has emerged from simple chatrooms, through videoconferencing tools to the creation of complex, interactive, and often multisensory virtual worlds. These multi-user technologies h...

Background: Over the past 25 years, the development of multiuser applications has seen considerable advancements and challenges. The technological development in this field has emerged from simple chat rooms through videoconferencing tools to the creation of complex, interactive, and often multisensory virtual worlds. These multiuser technologies h...

We designed a behavioral task called One-Trial Trace Escape Reaction (OTTER), in which rats incidentally associate two temporally discontinuous stimuli: a neutral acoustic cue (CS) with an aversive stimulus (US) which occurs two seconds later (CS-2s-US sequence). Rats are first habituated to two similar environmental contexts (A and B), each consis...

Forest environments have been proven beneficial for physiological well-being, supporting relaxation and meditative processes. Unfortunately, some groups, predominantly those with reduced mobility, are prevented from forest visitation. Presenting such environments in virtual reality could provide a viable substitute. However, as forest structure and...

We designed a behavioral task called One-Trial Trace Escape Reaction (OTTER), in which rats incidentally associate two temporally discontinuous stimuli: a neutral acoustic cue (CS) with an aversive stimulus (US) which occurs two seconds later (CS-2s-US sequence). Rats are first habituated to two similar environmental contexts (A and B), each consis...

There is a pressing need for an ecologically relevant behavioral task that would enable the study of elementary aspects of episodic memory. In everyday life, episodic memories are acquired incidentally in a single-encounter fashion and are composed of sub-events separated by time gaps. We designed a behavioral task called One-Trial Trace Escape Rea...

Standard approaches to cognitive remediation can suffer from limited skill transferability to patients' life. Complex virtual environments (VEs) enable us to create ecologically valid remediation scenarios while preserving laboratory conditions. Nevertheless, the feasibility and efficacy of these programs in psychiatric patients are still unknown....

Objectives. Schizophrenia has a debilitating impact on patient,s cognitive functioning and everyday activities. As a part of the treatment, schizophrenia patients attend sessions of cognitive remediation to restore impaired cognitive abilities. To combine cognitive and real life training, this study presents a virtual task to use in cognitive rehab...

Human perception and cognition are based predominantly on visual information processing. Much of the information regarding neuronal correlates of visual processing has been derived from functional imaging studies, which have identified a variety of brain areas contributing to visual analysis, recognition, and processing of objects and scenes. Howev...

Aims: Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a serious psychiatric disease characterized by repeated intrusive thoughts (obsessions) often followed by physical and/or mental acts (compulsions) which offer temporal relief to a patient. Presently, neurobiological substrate of checking behavior is not completely understood. Methods: We utilized compulsive...

Path integration is thought to rely on vestibular and proprioceptive cues yet most studies in humans involve primarily visual input, providing limited insight into their contributions. We developed a paradigm involving walking in an omnidirectional treadmill in which participants were guided on two legs of a triangle and then found their back way t...

With the growing use of navigation aids, it is necessary to assess whether these technologies are harmful to our cognitive skills. Our previous study concluded that with increased time spent with a navigation aid, participants' navigational performance decreased. Howerer, we only used a top-down stable GPS visualization while there are plenty diffe...

Impairment of executive and memory functions was repeatedly observed in various neuropsychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia. As the pharmacological treatment does not influence the deficit sufficiently, the significance of cognitive remediation increases in importance. The presented study introduces the virtual Supermarket Shopping Task (vSST...

Impairment of cognitive functioning represents a characteristic manifestation in various neuropsychiatric disorders. Schizophrenia (SZ) is characterised by significant impairment of declarative memory and executive functioning. Remediation of these cognitive functions is therefore a crucial part of the long-term care in SZ. In two pilot studies we...

Using intracranial electroencephalography, we aim to distinguish temporal dynamic of egocentric and allocentric navigation and its impact on low frequency oscillations in medial temporal lobe and hippocampal regions. We expect low theta (1-4 Hz) power in hippocampal channels to increase during movement and also to manifest earlier onset of activity...

The impairment of cognitive functioning represents a characteristic manifestation in various neuropsychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia (SZ). Previous studies demonstrated mild to severe deficit almost in all cognitive domains. Our results obtained in the virtual analogue of the carousel maze also demonstrate impairment of spatial memory and...

Impairment of cognitive functious was repeatedly observed in various neuropsychiatric disorders, particularly in schizophrenia. With increasing use of modern technologies in clinical practice, the domain of virtual reality is seemingly suitable medium for developing remediation tasks in ecologically valid euvironmeut. The presented pilot study intr...