ИСТИНА

Studying the impact of the occurrence of stressful situations on visual attention is an important task for improving the efficiency of professional activity.This study was aimed at investigation of the impact of stressful situation created during the work in virtual reality on visual attention. 21 health participants took part in the experiment. The special virtual environment consisting of white (distractors) and red (target) flying linear balls was presented in a highly immersive virtual reality CAVE-system. Participants task was to press the button to respond to the appearance of the target stimulus. Each subject participated in two series of experiments lasting 10 minutes each. In the second stressful condition, an unpleasant sound lasting 5 minutes was unexpectedly delivered were asked to count out loud in order to have a cognitive load. During experiment the reaction time and indicators of cardiac activity were recorded. As a result, half of the subjects made more than 50% of mistakes in the stress series when reacting to the target object. It was obtained that these participants demonstrated significant differences in heart rate variability and heart rate between the control and experimental series. Thus, it was obtained that in a stressful situation in virtual reality a decrease in visual attention was linked with a changes in the functional state.