Abstract
Virtual training systems provide highly realistic training environments for police. This study assesses whether a pain stimulus can enhance the training responses and sense of the presence of these systems. Police officers (n = 219) were trained either with or without a pain stimulus in a 2D simulator (VirTra V-300) and a 3D virtual reality (VR) system. Two (training simulator) × 2 (pain stimulus) ANOVAs revealed a significant interaction effect for perceived stress (p =.010, ηp2 =.039). Post-hoc pairwise comparisons showed that VR provokes significantly higher levels of perceived stress compared to VirTra when no pain stimulus is used (p =.009). With a pain stimulus, VirTra training provokes significantly higher levels of perceived stress compared to VirTra training without a pain stimulus (p <.001). Sense of presence was unaffected by the pain stimulus in both training systems. Our results indicate that VR training appears sufficiently realistic without adding a pain stimulus. Practitioner summary: Virtual police training benefits from highly realistic training environments. This study found that adding a pain stimulus heightened perceived stress in a 2D simulator, whereas it influenced neither training responses nor sense of presence in a VR system. VR training appears sufficiently realistic without adding a pain stimulus.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1608-1621 |
| Journal | Ergonomics |
| Volume | 66 |
| Issue number | 10 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2023 |
Funding
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement No. 833672. The content reflects only authors’ view. Research Executive Agency and European Commission are not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained herein. The authors would like to thank the Stadtpolizei Zürich for their collaboration in this study. In particular, we would like to thank Christoph Altmann for the organization and the police officers and instructors for participating in this study. We would like to thank Refense; particularly, Ronny Tobler for taking part in this project. Participants provided informed consent before the start of the experiment. Ethical approval was obtained from the Social and Societal Ethics Committee of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven as part of the SHOTPROS project which is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant number: 833672).