Effects of virtual reality-based cognitive training in older adults living without and with mild dementia: a pretest–posttest design pilot study

Table 1 A comparison of baseline cognitive performance in two research groups

Cognitive measures	The Student’s t test/the Welch’s t test^b			The Mann–Whitney U test^a
Cognitive measures	t^a	p	Hedges’s g	Z corr.^c	p
Digit symbol WAIS-R (PL)	2.899	0.005	0.65	2.748	0.006
CTT-1 time	− 2.301^d	0.029	0.76	− 2.986	0.003
CTT-1 errors	− 1.185^d	0.244	0.32	− 1.427	0.153
CTT-2 time	− 2.361^d	0.025	0.71	− 3.041	0.002
CTT-2 errors	− 1.457^d	0.156	0.45	− 2.178	0.029
d2 WZ	− 2.848	0.005	0.68	− 2.829	0.005
d2%B	1.021^d	0.474	0.16	− 0.519	0.604
d2 WZ-B	− 2.396	0.019	0.54	− 2.675	0.007
d2 ZK	1.014	0.310	0.23	1.226	0.220
Block design WAIS-R (PL)	3.018	0.003	0.68	2.426	0.015
ROCF copy	2.332^d	0.026	0.63	2.759	0.006
ROCF delayed recall	3.727	< 0.001	0.83	3.502	< 0.001
Digit span—forward WAIS-R (PL)	0.255	0.799	0.06	0.619	0.536
Digit span—backward WAIS-R (PL)	2.683	0.009	0.60	2.426	0.015
AVLT list A, trial 1	2.579	0.011	0.58	2.319	0.020
AVLT list A, trial 5	5.528	< 0.001	1.24	4.558	< 0.001
AVLT list B	3.324^d	0.001	0.57	3.042	0.002
AVLT list A, trial 6	4.414	< 0.001	0.99	3.949	< 0.001
AVLT list A, trial 7	4.961	< 0.001	1.11	4.206	< 0.001
AVLT list A, recognition	0.221^d	0.827	0.07	1.729	0.084
BVRT correct reproductions indicator	3.333	0.001	0.75	2.873	0.004
BVRT errors indicator	− 3.642^d	< 0.001	0.95	− 3.398	< 0.001
Famous faces test	4.778^d	< 0.001	1.28	4.713	< 0.001
Verbal fluency (ACE-III)	3.967	< 0.001	0.89	3.192	0.001
Boston naming test	2.163^d	0.038	0.63	1.958	0.050

The means and standard deviations for all the above mentioned cognitive measures in both research groups are presented in Table 3 which contains the means and standard deviations for both groups in pretest and posttest
^aThe t test was supplemented by the non-parametric Mann–Whitney U test due to unequal number of participants in both groups
^bIf the Levene’s test indicated the unequality of variances, the Welch’s t test was calculated
^cCorrection for ties in the ranking
^dThe Welch’s t test

ISSN: 1756-0500