Contemporary police officers often lack a proper understanding of civilian’s mental states required to deliver an appropriate empathic response. Recently, virtual reality (VR) emerged as a...Show moreContemporary police officers often lack a proper understanding of civilian’s mental states required to deliver an appropriate empathic response. Recently, virtual reality (VR) emerged as a promising medium to promote empathy, offering several crucial advantages over traditional methods. However, as research is limited on VR empathy training, its effectiveness and practical utility for the police remains unclear. This study investigated the effectivity and utility of two VR empathy tools for the Dutch police force. In this study, 11 Dutch police officers were immersed in two simulations of the perspectives of a child victim of domestic violence (DV) and a person living with a mild intellectual disability (MID), in counterbalanced order. Results showed that, in line with the hypotheses, for the DV simulation, participants’ illusionary feeling of presence in the virtual world predicted their emotional involvement with the experience, and in turn, this emotional involvement predicted empathy towards victims of domestic violence. Contrary to the hypotheses, for the MID simulation, presence did not predict emotional involvement. Yet, in line with the hypotheses, emotional involvement did predict empathy towards people living with a mild intellectual disability. Combined with insights from post-simulation interviews, both VR empathy tools are concluded to be effective and useful for Dutch police empathy training. These findings highlight VR’s potential to shape scalable and standardardized training opportunities to support the complex role of contemporary policing. Future research could extend our approach by including a control group and by making a direct comparison between VR, traditional perspective-taking tasks, and roleplay empathy training.Show less
Spatial cognition deficits can be caused by various factors including aging, neurodegenerative disease, stroke, or TBI, and have thus far received inadequate attention in the literature. This study...Show moreSpatial cognition deficits can be caused by various factors including aging, neurodegenerative disease, stroke, or TBI, and have thus far received inadequate attention in the literature. This study aims to further our understanding of spatial cognition in order to progress the field and assist in the assessment and diagnostics of associated deficits in affected populations. Research has outlined the practicality of VR in assessing cognitive complaints. VR can provide ecological validity to navigation assessments and can be used alongside neuropsychological tools to further understand cognitive deficits. Therefore, the objectives of this study were to investigate the relationships of presence and subjective navigation ability with objective navigation performance in VR, and to further examine the effect of gender on navigation performance. The van der Ham et al. (2020) online task battery was used to assess spatial navigation ability by requiring participants to complete five tasks testing landmark, location and path knowledge. The experiment was conducted online on a computer or phone screen. Sense of presence in the virtual environment and subjective navigation ability were measured using the IPQ (Schubert, Friedmann, and Regenbrecht, 2001) and the WQ (Claessen et al., 2016). A test-retest design was employed to investigate the gender differences in performance over time. The results of this study indicate that presence is not a significant predictor of navigation performance in the VR task. However, subjective navigation ability did predict objective navigation performance. Additionally, gender differences were found in performance over time, with males consistently performing better than females. These findings suggest a need to further investigate the different navigation mechanisms used by males and females, and the effect that stereotypical beliefs have on performance. In conclusion, this study determined that assessment of navigation abilities is not affected by experienced presence, and thus can be made accessible in an online format. The findings for gender differences and the relationship between subjective navigation ability and objective navigation performance also have the potential to contribute evidence-based improvements in assessments, diagnostics and rehabilitation interventions. Further research is required to investigate the effect of different levels of immersion on sense of presence and performance as this could affect VR assessment of navigation.Show less
