Use of Incremental Adaptation and Habituation Regimens for Mitigating Optokinetic Side-effects

The use of incremental and repeated exposures regimens have been put forth as effective means to mitigate visually induced motion sickness based on the Dual Process Theory (DPT) (Groves & Thompson, 1970) of neural plasticity. In essence, DPT suggests that by incrementing stimulus intensity the depression opponent process should be allowed to exert greater control over the net outcome than the sensitization opponent process, thereby minimizing side-effects. This conceptual model was tested by empirically validating the effectiveness of adaptation, incremental adaptation, habituation, and incremental habituation regimens to mitigate side-effects arising from exposure to an optokinetic drum. Forty college students from the University of Central Florida participated in the experimentation and were randomly assigned to a regimen. Efforts were taken to balance distribution of participants in the treatments for gender and motion sickness susceptibility. Results indicated that overall, the application of an incremental regimen is effective in reducing side-effects (e.g. malaise, dropout rates, postural instabilities, etc.) when compared to a non-incremented regimen, whether it be a one-time or repeated exposure. Furthermore, the application of the Motion History Questionnaire (MHQ) (Graybiel & Kennedy, 1965) for identifying high and low motion sickness susceptible individuals proved effective. Finally, gender differences in motion sickness were not found in this experiment as a result of balancing susceptibility with the gender subject variable. Findings from this study can be used to aid effective design of virtual environment (VE) usage regimens in an effort to manage cybersickness. Through pre-exposure identification of susceptible individuals via the MHQ, exposure protocols can be devised that may extend limits on exposure durations, mitigate side-effects, reduce dropout rates, and possibly increase training effectiveness. This document contains a fledgling set of guidelines form VE usage that append those under development by Stanney, Kennedy, & Kingdon (In press) and other previously established guidelines form simulator use (Kennedy et al., 1987). It is believed that through proper allocation of effective VE usage regimens cybersickness can be managed, if susceptible individuals are identified prior to exposure

Evaluation of performance in emergency response scenarios: a virtual environment skill retention study

The research described in this thesis investigates the longitudinal retention of skills attained by naïve subjects who had completed a virtual induction training. This work is a continuation of the original induction training conducted by Smith & Veitch (2017, 2018). The original induction training introduced participants to a “virtual offshore platform” where they were taught basic safety and egress procedures. After a period of 6 to 9 months, the participants were re-exposed to the virtual environment and tested again. The researcher has hypothesized that participants will demonstrate skill fade over this period, and there will be a difference in repeated measures between exposures. Retention of key concepts were evaluated to determine where skill fade was most prominent, and the amount of retraining required to bring participants back to competency was recorded. The experimental results demonstrated that skill fade was most prominent in foundational testing scenarios where participants were first re-exposed to each learning objective. Further, the results indicated that the participants were quickly re-trained to post training competency after initial re-exposure to the environment. The findings of the experiment support the research hypothesis