Epilogue 6 111 include the hierarchical structure of law enforcement agencies which make modifications to training practices a slow process, the level of realism that police instructors are able to achieve with the resources available to them, and the current testing practices of isolated skills. In Chapter 2, we provide evidence of similarities and differences in training practices of European police agencies. In Chapter 3, we compared police officers’ training responses to VR and real-life scenariobased training. Specifically, we investigated physical training responses such as heart rate and movement data, as well as psychological training responses such as mental effort and perceived stress. We showed that there were no significant differences in the psychological training responses of police officers to VR and real-life training. During real-life training, however, police officers experienced significantly higher levels of maximum heart rate and average level of physical activity compared to VR training. In addition, we assessed whether the sense of presence (i.e., the feeling of ‘truly’ being there in the virtual environment) and participant characteristics would predict the mental effort and perceived stress of police officers during VR training. We have shown that sense of presence (particularly VR engagement and the experience of negative effects) predicted perceived stress, while participant characteristics did not. Conversely, both sense of presence (particularly VR engagement and the experience of negative effects) and participant characteristics (particularly gaming frequency) predicted the mental effort exerted in VR. Thus, in Chapter 3, we have shown that VR training is experienced and perceived differently than real-life training and therefore requires a different instructional design. In Chapter 4, we added a pain stimulus to virtual training simulators, including VR, to determine whether a pain stimulus increases the representativeness of virtual training environments. We utilized a 2D training simulator (VirTra) and a VR training system (VR) to assess the training effort and sense of presence of police officers during the virtual training with and without a pain stimulus. We found a significant interaction between the training simulator and pain stimulus for perceived stress: When officers trained without a pain stimulus in the VR and VirTra, VR provoked significantly higher levels of perceived stress compared to VirTra. Only in the VirTra, training with a pain stimulus provokes significantly higher levels of perceived stress compared to training without a pain stimulus. The addition of a pain stimulus had no effect on any other training response measures (i.e., average HR, maximum HR, mental effort) or sense of presence in both training systems. Thus, in Chapter 4, we show that VR training may provide a sufficiently stressful training environment without the addition of a pain stimulus, while other training simulators like the VirTra may benefit from a pain stimulus to increase the representativeness of the training environment.
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