Chapter 1 16 Integrated Model of Perceptual-Motor Performance and Anxiety The integrated model of perceptual-motor performance and anxiety (Nieuwenhuys & Oudejans, 2012, 2017) describes the influence of anxiety on perceptual-motor performance. The model suggests that personal and environmental characteristics influence the experience of anxiety in pressure situations. Experiencing high levels of anxiety may lead to stimulus-driven control (e.g., attending to threat-related rather than task-relevant information). The experience of anxiety can be mitigated by the investment of extra mental effort which in turn may lead to goal-directed control (e.g., attending to task-relevant rather than threat-related information). The outcome of the balance between stimulus-driven or goal-directed control influences how a person perceives, selects, and acts under pressure. The investment of additional mental effort, if invested appropriately, may correct the balance. Police officers perform in stressful contexts that lead to an increase in anxiety. Studies in reallife training have shown that training with anxiety improves performance in high pressure situations (Nieuwenhuys et al., 2009; Nieuwenhuys et al., 2012; Nieuwenhuys & Oudejans, 2010, 2011). For VR training to be beneficial, the virtual environment and training scenarios should be able to elicit stress responses in trainees. Therefore, the VR experiments in this thesis (particularly, Chapters 3 and 4) assess the physiological responses (e.g., heart rate), stress mitigation strategies (e.g., investment of mental effort), and subjective levels of perceived stress of police officers. Representative Learning Design Representative learning design provides an instructional framework for designing effective learning environments (Pinder et al., 2011). The framework describes the importance of dynamical interactions between the learner and their environment (i.e., ecological dynamics, Davids et al., 2013). Individuals experience a variety of (task) constraints in their performance environment that provide new information to update and inform their subsequent actions. The constant interplay between perception (e.g., detecting visual and auditory information in the environment) and action (e.g., moving towards an intended goal) provides adaptive and functional solutions to effectively engage with the environment. When designing training environments, the constraints that learners experience in their performance environment should be included in the training environment to allow learners to explore adaptive and functional solutions relevant to the performance context in training. To implement a representative learning design in VR, we first ensured that we utilize VR systems that provide functional, full-body movements (e.g., the possibility to walk normally in VR; use
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw