Incorporating Affective Stressors in Virtual Training Environments

Virtual environment (VE) technology is one training method designed to promote effective information transfer to the real world. The goal of many VE trainers is improved cognitive and/or psychomotor performance. While both cognitive and psychomotor behaviors are important to task learning and performance, Bloom identified an additional behavior in his Taxonomy of Learning: affective behaviors. The study and understanding of affect in any VE training system is important to optimize learning and training transfer. Past work suggests that incorporating affect in VEs is challenging, as affective responses are not always experienced in VEs regardless of visual fidelity and large individual differences in affective responses have been reported. To address current limitations in creating an affectively appropriate VE training system, this proposal outlines development of the Affective Virtual Environment Training System (A-VETS) framework for introducing affect into VE training systems. A-VETS includes an architecture for determining trainee context, instructional context, desired approaches for creating immersion, and a set of strategies for aligning these contexts into one cohesive training environment designed to optimize learning and training transfer. By identifying how affective cues impact learning, designers can incorporate appropriate affective cues into training VEs to increase the effectiveness of VE training, particularly for high stress military environments.