Summary B 137 in the real-life training compared to VR. The level of average heart rate and perceived stress did not significantly differ between VR and real-life training. During VR training, police officers invested more mental effort compared to real-life training. Mental effort was predicted by the VR experience of police officers (particularly the experience of engagement and negative effects), as well as participant characteristics (particularly gaming frequency). Findings in Chapter 3 demonstrate that VR training can be a useful tool for training under stress and that the VR training session may be experienced differently based on the quality of the VR system and the participant’s technology affinity. Taken together, Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 provide insight into the implementation of VR into existing police training practices. It is shown that the advantages of VR (i.e., flexibility in scenario design, independence of training location) mitigate the drawbacks of current European police training practices (i.e., limited training facilities, level of realism in training). Similarly, VR was shown to elicit training responses — such as average heart rate and perceived stress — that were similar to what police officers experienced during real-life training. Thus, VR training should be implemented to supplement existing training practices as a tool that creates stressful and flexible virtual environments. Chapter 4 investigates how virtual training simulators can be made more representative through the addition of a pain stimulus. VR system generally rely on audio-visual stimuli as primary information sources about the environment. In real-life, police officers experience haptic information, olfactory stimuli, and nociception. Thus, the representativeness of VR and the responses to the virtual environment may be enhanced by adding a pain stimulus that simulates a threatening opponent. The results showed that the addition of pain stimulus to VR did not further enhance the already high levels of perceived stress, mental effort, heart rate, or sense of presence. Considering the highly immersive and cognitively demanding environment for trainees should be inherent to the design of virtual police training. Chapter 5 shows how the After-Action Review tool of a VR system can be used to enhance the learning efficacy of police officers. The After-Action Review tool allows police instructors and trainees to give and receive objective performance feedback of the training scenarios. This study has demonstrated that using the bird’s eye view in combination with the suspect perspective enhances the learning efficacy of police officers over the use of the bird’s eye view only. The bird’s eye view in combination with the police officer perspective also elicited high level of learning efficacy — although not as high as the combination of bird’s eye view and suspect perspective. Using the feature of the line of fire of the service weapon did not influence learning efficacy of police officers. Hence, when using the After-Action Review tool to provide
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