Effects of Training Modality on Military Vehicle Identification in a Virtual Environment

Using the Deployable Virtual Training Environment (DVTE) simulation suite, we investigated the effects of two different training types (military issued cards and 1:35 scale models) on participant’s abilities to correctly identify military vehicles. Using independent samples t-tests, it was found that neither the cards nor scale models of the same vehicles had an effect on identification scores when the participants were tested in the DVTE environment. We then compared this current study to a previous study that tested the two training modalities using the same media instead of a virtual environment. We found results for recognition demonstrating that either training was sufficient for predicting performance in the virtual environment. Performance for identifying the vehicles was significant only when the training and testing modality were the same.