Evaluating the Effect of Startling and Surprising Events in Immersive Training Systems for Emergency Response

Abstract

In emergency situations, emergency service personnel are often confronted with unexpected events that are difficult to manage. The aim of this study is to identify and understand the impact of complex and startling cues generated by these events to contribute to the development of realistic virtual-world training simulations. Two factors were explored for this purpose: the complexity of the action relevance check and the intensity of the unexpected event, which were varied across four experimental conditions of a simulated emergency reaction time task. Results showed that startling participants did not interrupt their on-going task, but that increasing the complexity of the task did. From this, we propose that unexpected events in training simulations should additionally expose trainees to complex and realistic situations, rather than simply startling them with sudden audio/visual stimuli.