Assessing Executive Functioning in Schizophrenia: Concurrent and Discriminative Validity of a Novel Virtual Cooking Task.

Deficits in executive functions (EF) are strongly related to real-life functioning and negative symptoms (NS) in schizophrenia. Recently, virtual reality has enabled more ecologically valid approaches to assess EF in simulated "real-life" scenarios among which the virtual cooking task (VCT) has gained attention. However, the clinical implications of the VCT in schizophrenia have not been investigated exhaustively. In this study, clinically stable individuals with schizophrenia (n = 38) and healthy controls (n = 42) completed a novel VCT and a set of computerized standard EF tools (CST) to primarily investigate concurrent and discriminant validity. In addition, the study explored links between EF assessments, functioning, and NS while controlling for antipsychotic intake, clinical stability, and age. This VCT consisted of four tasks with increasing difficulty and time constraints. The most relevant findings indicate that (1) the VCT showed moderate to strong correlations with CST, (2) the VCT discriminated EF performance between both the groups, (3) the VCT predicted interpersonal functioning, and (4) the VCT predicted NS in greater extent than CST. Accordingly, the findings give support to the concurrent and discriminant validity of the VCT to assess EF and indicate its value to deepen the study of collateral functional deficits and NS in schizophrenia.