Effects of auditory feedback and task difficulty on the cognitive load and virtual presence in a virtual reality dental simulation

Abstract

This research examined the difference in cognitive load and the virtual presence depending on auditory feedback and task difficulty in haptic-based dental simulation. In the field of dental education, practice-centered training using handpiece has been crucial because a practitioner's psychomotor experience has a significant impact on the mastery of treatment skills. For the novice, it is necessary to reduce errors in dental treatment to enhancing skill acquisition in the haptic practice. In the training process, the force-feedback is crucial to elaborate subtle movement to guide what to do and how it should be hard or soft. However, It is not easy to add force-feedback to generate kinetic experience training. As an alternative method, we examined that auditory feedback can help learners' skill training. In this study, we analyzed how the presence/absence of auditory feedback at the different levels of task difficulty impacts learners' psychological demand and virtual presence in the virtual reality simulation. For this study, 29 dental college students participated in a dental simulation. The participants were grouped into two conditions that are with and without auditory feedback. Additionally, two consecutive tooth preparation tasks with different levels of difficulty were used in the simulation. The auditory feedback condition gives alarms to a learner when he treats a non-targeted tooth with a virtual handpiece. The user's cognitive load and virtual presence were measured to examine the effects of auditory feedback. The results revealed that the main effect was found in cognitive loads. Also, a significant interaction effect was shown in the virtual presence. We discussed the effective design methods for the virtual reality-based dental simulation through the result of this study.