Using Non-immersive VR Simulations in Conjunction with Priming to Enhance Conceptualizing Radiation and Risk

Radiation is present daily and used throughout many industries for beneficial purposes. Safety professionals and workers need a general understanding of radiation identification techniques and associated risks to manage the work environment with radiation protection practices. This is especially important in workplaces where the radiation source is ancillary to the primary activities of the industry. The elusive nature of radiation makes learners understanding in an educational setting a challenge. Furthermore, delivering a hands-on experience to support learning and training of radiation, its assessment, and protection measures is quite difficult, given its hazardous nature. Virtual reality, even using non-immersive environments, offers significant benefits through simulating sources of radiation. A non-immersive simulator titled AssessRadVR, facilitated the radiation experience and presented dynamically the effects of the trainees' interactions with shielding materials, detection equipment, and the working environment. Yet, interaction with simulation alone may not trigger effective encoding of these critical aspects in long-term memory. This paper discusses using the AssessRadVR simulator in conjunction with a procedure for subliminally priming the long-term memory encoding to enhance radiation's activated representation. Students in an introductory industrial hygiene class were divided into two groups and primed with either alarming or non-alarming words following the Bargh, Chen, & Borrows procedure (1996). Results demonstrated that students primed with alarming words were more open to objectively evaluating the radiation sources due to their overall perception that the risk was manageable. Why is this of interest to the community: The results provided that even with limited prior knowledge in radiation, after engaging with the simulator, most students were able to recognize and apply radiation principles, which indicates they could apply key principles in a real-world radiation workplace. Further, the impact of activating with alarming words led to a statistically significantly higher perception that working in the radiation environment was manageable.