Chapter 3 66 trainees’ experience with VR as a training tool and whether the experience with the training tool itself influences the psychological responses of trainees. Of the predictor variables measured in this study, we found that the VR experience variables explained the greatest single proportion of variance in perceived stress and mental effort (20% and 21%, respectively). When police officers experienced more engagement with the virtual environment and more negative effects, they perceived higher levels of stress and invested more mental effort. The relation between experiencing negative effects in VR and the psychological responses provoked by VR indicates that, in order for VR SBT to elicit similar psychological responses to RL SBT, the experience of negative effects in VR should be reduced as much as possible. To this end, any available technical, content, and human-factor solutions should be considered to minimize the risk of cybersickness and other adverse effects (e.g., Chang et al., 2020). Similarly, the relation between engagement and psychological responses to VR suggests that VR SBT requires sufficient levels of engagement with the virtual environment and content. To increase engagement, findings of Pengnate et al. (2020) showed that VR environments that have an interactive, narrative design result in higher engagement compared to VR that did not have a narrative-based environment (for practical recommendations on how to design a VR scenario that promotes engagement, see section 5, ‘Concluding remarks’). Limitations and future directions Although the study aimed to investigate VR and RL SBT in an operational field-training environment to obtain ecologically valid results, the design and application have limitations. First, the current study aimed to investigate differences in the training modalities of VR and RL SBT as they are currently used in police practice. To take advantage of the inherent differences in the training modalities, a direct comparison between the two training modalities and inferences about their effectiveness compared to each other was not possible as the training set-ups differed in scenario repetition, task, context, duration, and number and intensity of confrontations in the scenarios. Additionally, modality-specific instructions such as the safety instruction to avoid running during VR SBT provided differences in training delivery of the modalities. While the scenarios in VR SBT and RL SBT were based on pre-written scenarioscripts, the developments of the scenarios were based on the actions of the trainees leading to differences in scenario execution and timing of events even within training groups. Thus, if the goal is to achieve a one-to-one comparison of the training modalities in terms of their effectiveness in producing a certain training response (and other measures of interest), future studies may want to standardize the training set-ups as much as possible. In this study, however, we wanted to gain initial insights into (i) the application of the modalities (taking into account that the two types of training are inherently different), (ii) show that VR can elicit training
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