No Pain, No Gain? The Effects of Adding a Pain Stimulus in Virtual Training for Police Officers 4 75 such as perceived stress and mental effort during the training simulation in groups that train with and without a pain stimulus. Secondly, we hypothesise that by adding a pain stimulus to the virtual training simulator (i.e. adding the sensory modality of nociceptive stimulation), the sense of presence in the virtual environment is enhanced compared to a training simulation without the pain stimulus (Gallace et al., 2012). Sense of presence refers to the experience of being or feeling physically present in a simulated environment (North & North, 2016). As such, higher levels of sense of presence contribute to realistic display of behaviour in a virtual simulation and thus provide more representativeness to training contexts (Slater, 2009). We investigated whether the addition of a pain stimulus influences the training responses and sense of the presence of police officers utilising two different types of virtual training simulators: an interactive 2D simulator consisting of five screens arranged in 300 degrees (VirTra V-300) and an advanced, interactive 3D VR training systems specifically designed for police (Refense). We selected a 2D and 3D training simulator to examine if any effects of the pain stimulus rely on the type of simulator used for training. Particularly as immersion, presence, and skill acquisition appear to differ between 2D and 3D simulations (Ashraf et al., 2015; Gąsiorek et al., 2019), we aimed to explore whether the effect of a pain stimulus would differ between simulators. By investigating the influence of a pain stimulus on the training responses and sense of presence in different types of virtual training simulators, we aim to support the development of virtual training for police practice. METHODS Participants This study was conducted in collaboration with the Stadtpolizei Zürich (City Police Zurich). In total, 219 police officers of the Stadtpolizei Zürich (180 male, 35 female, and 4 other; M age = 38.22, SD = 9.16) participated in this study. The participants’ experience on the job ranged from 2 to 37 years (M years = 12.57 years, SD = 8.98). 83 of the study participants (64 male, 17 female, and 2 other) provided additional information on their technology experience: 23 participants experienced VR in the form of gaming or as a commercial product before. 60 participants had never experienced VR before the training. Participants provided informed consent before the start of the experiment. Ethical approval was obtained from the Social and Societal Ethics Committee of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven as part of the SHOTPROS project which is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant number: 833672).
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