MacIntyre Erin, Whitaker Mirinda M, Braithwaite Felicity A, Stefanucci Jeanine K, Stanton Tasha R
IIMPACT in Health, Allied Health and Human Performance, University of South Australia, GPO Box 2471, Adelaide, South Australia, 5001, Australia.
Persistent Pain Research Group, Hopwood Centre for Neurobiology, Lifelong Health Theme, South Australia Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI), Adelaide, Australia.
Psychol Res. 2025 May 20;89(3):101. doi: 10.1007/s00426-025-02125-0.
Theories of embodied perception posit that the visuospatial perception of one's environment is not only bound by features of the environmental itself, but also by the body capacity and affective state of the individual. Hill steepness and distance estimation tasks are widely used to assess the influence of physiological and psychological factors on visuospatial perception, but their test-retest reliability and measurement error are unknown. Such information is important to contextualise repeated measures study designs and understanding individual level differences. We aimed to evaluate the test-retest reliability and establish the smallest real difference (SRD) of three commonly used visuospatial perception tasks (ascending and descending hill steepness estimation, the distance-on-hill task) in healthy controls (n = 33) and people with painful knee osteoarthritis (n = 33). All participants completed the virtual reality visuospatial perception tasks two times, one week apart. Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC), Bland-Altman plots, and SRD were used to evaluate the tasks. Our results revealed that both hill steepness estimation tasks are suitable for repeat administration in both populations given excellent reliability (uphill ICC = 0.80 to 0.85; downhill ICC = 0.89 to 0.90) and high sensitivity to change (uphill SRD = 17.7 to 18.9 degrees; downhill SRD = 12.1 to 14.7 degrees). The distance-on-hill task may have limited utility due to its poor reliability (ICC = 0.29 to 0.38) and low sensitivity to change (SRD = 6.20 to 8.5 m). Our findings provide methodological support for the use of hill steepness tasks as a measure of visuospatial perception in embodied perception research.
具身认知理论认为,个体对自身所处环境的视觉空间感知不仅受环境本身特征的限制,还受个体身体能力和情感状态的影响。坡度和距离估计任务被广泛用于评估生理和心理因素对视觉空间感知的影响,但其重测信度和测量误差尚不清楚。这些信息对于重复测量研究设计的背景化以及理解个体水平差异非常重要。我们旨在评估健康对照组(n = 33)和膝关节疼痛性骨关节炎患者(n = 33)中三种常用视觉空间感知任务(上坡和下坡坡度估计、山上距离任务)的重测信度,并确定最小真实差异(SRD)。所有参与者在相隔一周的时间内完成两次虚拟现实视觉空间感知任务。使用组内相关系数(ICC)、布兰德 - 奥特曼图和SRD来评估这些任务。我们的结果表明,鉴于其出色的信度(上坡ICC = 0.80至0.85;下坡ICC = 0.89至0.90)和对变化的高敏感性(上坡SRD = 17.7至18.9度;下坡SRD = 12.1至14.7度),两种坡度估计任务适用于这两个人群的重复测量。由于其信度较差(ICC = 0.29至0.38)和对变化的敏感性较低(SRD = 6.20至8.5米),山上距离任务的实用性可能有限。我们的研究结果为在具身认知研究中使用坡度任务作为视觉空间感知的一种测量方法提供了方法学支持。