The Trade-off between Real-world and Simulation Scenario-based Training in the Dutch Navy

Abstract

Dealing with stressful situations is an essential skill in military actions, since high levels of stress-arousal result in emotional, cognitive and/or physiological stress arousal and often impair performances. In the Navy, scenario-based training (SBT) is used to reduce the negative effects of stress. However, it remains challenging to adapt these trainingscenarios to real-life events. This study investigates the trade-off between real-world SBT and simulation SBT in Navy officer trainees by means of stress-related arousal, namely cognitive appraisal, heart rate and state anxiety, and influences of environmental factors on motion sickness, sleep quality, daily load, difficulty of the task and length of stressortime in both tasks. We expected both scenarios to induce stress-related arousal, but more stress-related arousal in the real-world SBT than in the simulation SBT. Results revealed that both SBTs evoked anxiety. Participants perceived both SBTs to cost the same amount of effort; however the weather and other shipping appear to be more impeding during the simulation SBT. Furthermore, findings indicate more motion-sickness and more/longer stressors in the real-world SBT. Although the scenarios differ significantly, results show equivalent heart rates and cognitive appraisals. These findings indicate that SBTs indeed can be seen as motivated-performance situations evoking stress-related arousal and there is a trade-off between the two SBTs arising from task complexity and environmental factors.