Honing a surgeon's decision making skills in the presence of mechanical tasks

Although surgeons perform procedures and tasks under a significant amount of cognitive load, current simulators focus on training psychomotor skills in isolation. This may limit the transfer of learned skills to actual surgical environments.

Visuohaptic simulations were created that required participants to hone psychomotor skills in the presence of cognitive load. A control group (n = 7) trained on conventional skills simulator and their performance was compared with the experimental group (n = 7) in terms of learning curves and performance on a transfer task.

The experimental group performed significantly better than the control group in terms of both learning curves and performance on the transfer task.

Simulations that combine psychomotor and cognitive skills training are more effective than simulators that focus on psychomotor skills in isolation.