Virtual Reality Training for Police Officers: A Comparison of Training Responses in VR and Real-life Training 3 65 Since participants in our study experienced similar levels of perceived stress during VR SBT and RL SBT, we would expect that participants invest similar amounts of mental effort during both training modalities. Because high levels of (perceived) stress can negatively influence the performance of police officers, a compensatory strategy to negate the influence of stress is the investment of extra mental effort (see attentional control theory, Eysenck et al., 2007). Thus, similar levels of perceived stress would require similar levels of mental effort to negate the stress responses. In contrast, we found that participants invested more mental effort during VR SBT compared to RL SBT. A possible explanation for this finding may be that VR SBT places more extraneous cognitive load on trainees than RL SBT does (Mugford et al., 2013). In accordance with the cognitive load theory (CLT; Van Merrienboer & Sweller, 2005), extraneous cognitive load refers to the demands a trainee experiences that are not relevant for and potentially harmful to learning (Clark et al., 2011; Paas et al., 2003). During VR SBT, it may be that participants experience additional extraneous cognitive load and had to invest more mental effort to get used to the newness of the virtual environment, VR equipment, and VR as a training tool. To test this reasoning, we further investigated whether factors such as participants’ level of prior use of technology and VR experiences affect invested mental effort in VR. Indeed, we found that invested mental effort in VR SBT was related to participant characteristics that are suggestive of technological affinity. This relation between participants characteristics such as age, VR knowledge, gaming frequency, or previous VR experience was only found for mental effort and not for perceived stress. We therefore (precautiously) infer that during VR SBT mental effort is invested as a strategy to process information of the virtual environment, rather than for stress mitigation alone, and that experience with VR and gaming makes navigating the VR environment mentally less demanding. This notion is in line with existing research (Rosa et al., 2016), indicating that trainees with a high gaming frequency need to invest little mental effort to get used to and engage with the virtual environment. Similarly, people with more gaming experience have been shown to recover from cybersickness better than people with little gaming experience (da Silva Marinho et al., 2022). Thus, police trainers have to be aware that trainees with differing characteristics (e.g., trainees with much gaming experience vs. trainees with little gaming experience) may have different psychological experiences in the VR SBT. Next to participant characteristics that influence the psychological responses of trainees during VR SBT, the momentary experiences of the virtual environment during the training also appears to play a vital role in the psychological responses that officers experience during VR SBT. Investigating VR experience-specific factors like those measured by the ITC-SOPI (i.e., spatial presence, engagement, ecological validity, and negative effects) provides insights into the
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw