Keywords

Tactile, Stress, Military, Training, Tourniquet

Abstract

In combat, soldiers encounter stress from multiple sources including loss of sleep, extremely high levels of physical and psychological discomfort, extended periods of increased vigilance, and intense danger. Therefore, it is imperative to train such personnel on how to cope with these stressors. One way to do this is to include stressors in different forms of training to acclimate soldiers to the subsequent stress of combat. Due to their advantages, tactile trainers are being investigated increasingly for the use of training Army medics in this context. The present work examines how vibrating tactile sensors, or tactors, can be used as surrogate sources of stress on an operator performing a simulated medical task. This work also examines how this "optimal" configuration interacts with other types of stress, such as noise and time pressure. The outcome findings support the hypotheses that configurations placed on sensitive body areas are more stressful than those placed on more benign body locations in terms of worse task performance on a tourniquet application task. In terms of application times, the same trends persist in terms of proper application, subjective stress and subjective workload, as well as a secondary monitoring task, in terms of response times, accuracy, and time estimation. Additionally, findings supported hypotheses that the stress responses experienced order tactile stress alone is compounded when other types of stress are employed, both on the primary and secondary tasks. These results have implications for training, such that if stressors are employed in training, performance decrements might be lessened during actual task performance; they can be generalized to not only combat medics, but other military specialties and civilian jobs that incur vibration, auditory stress, and time pressure while engaged in performance.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2008

Advisor

Hancock, Peter

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Sciences

Department

Psychology

Degree Program

Psychology

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0002028

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0002028

Language

English

Release Date

March 2009

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Open Access)

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Psychology Commons

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