Development of a VR Training System for improvement of multitasking ability

-Effective attentional resource expansion through graded cognitive burden-

Abstract

When the robot arm is manipulated simultaneously with the natural body, it becomes multitasking, which places a significant burden on human cognitive abilities. We hypothesize that training that applies moderate attentional load in stages will expand the amount of effective attentional resource and improve multitasking ability. Therefore, we constructed two VR environments: a training stage to expand attentional resource by applying graded attentional load, and a test stage to evaluate the amount of attentional resource. We conducted several sets of training and evaluated the effective attentional resource in the test stage before and after the training, and compared the evaluations. The results suggested that training with graded attentional load can expand the effective attentional resources.