Background
Virtual reality (VR) surgery training has become a trend in clinical education. Many research papers validate the effectiveness of VR-based surgical simulators in training medical students. However, most existing articles employ subjective methods to study the residents’ surgical skills improvement. Few of them investigate how to improve the surgery skills on specific dimensions substantially.
Methods
Our paper resorts to physiological approaches to objectively study the quantitative influence and performance analysis of VR laparoscopic surgical training system for medical students. Fifty-one participants were recruited from a pool of medical students. They conducted four pre and post experiments in the training box. They were trained on VR-based laparoscopic surgery simulators (VRLS) in the middle of pre and post experiments. Their operation and physiological data (heart rate and electroencephalogram) are recorded during the pre and post experiments. The physiological data is used to compute cognitive load and flow experience quantitatively. Senior surgeons graded their performance using newly designed hybrid standards for fundamental tasks and Global operative assessment of laparoscopic skills (GOALS) standards for colon resection tasks. Finally, the participants were required to fill the questionnaires about their cognitive load and flow experience.
Results
After training on VRLS, the time of the experimental group to complete the same task could drop sharply (p < 0.01). The performance scores are enhanced significantly (p < 0.01). The performance and cognitive load computed from EEG are negatively correlated (p < 0.05).
Conclusion
The results show that the VRLS could highly improve medical students' performance and enable the participants to obtain flow experience with a lower cognitive load. Participants' performance is negatively correlated with cognitive load through quantitative physiological analysis. This might provide a new way of assessing skill acquirement.
This paper assesses the impact of emotional arousal on learning through a virtual reality video of geography immersion learning. Validity was measured with traditional questionnaire data and using electroencephalography (EEG). Twenty-four human subjects were recruited and presented with eight geography immersive learning videos with different affective tendencies. EEG data of the subjects were collected while they were watching the videos. After the video watching, subjects were requested to fill in an emotion scale, a learning motivation scale, and a mind flow experience. The results of the study show that VR video learning materials can well induce the positive and negative emotions of the subjects. Compared with negative emotions, the alpha band power in the frontal lobe of the brain, beta and gamma bands in the temporal lobe region is significantly higher under positive emotions. In addition, the results of the subjective scales indicate that subjects have stronger intrinsic motivations and better flow experiences under positive emotions. However, there was no significant difference for the immersion under positive and negative emotions. Our findings demonstrate the usability of teaching virtual reality situational geography stories and the broad value of using this teaching method for future instruction.
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