The effect of modification psychomotor tasks in the virtual reality on cadence and behavioural responses of cycling

Abstract

Virtual reality is an alternative tool to provide a safe and competitive environment, especially for training and competitions. This study aims to evaluate the effects of modified psychomotor tasks in the virtual reality on the alpha/beta ratio, power output, heart rate, and cadence. The participants are recruited among national development cyclists from National Sport School. The environment of virtual reality was modified from the available virtual reality TACX smart trainer system. The one-way multivariate of variance (MANOVA) identified the effects of the five different levels of psychomotor task (independent variables) in virtual reality on multiple variables of physiological responses. The MANOVA results indicate a statistically significant multivariate main effect for the five levels of task difficulty in road cycling, when jointly considering on the variables of alpha/beta ratio, power output, heart rate, and cadence. The multivariate general linear model for univariate ANOVA results demonstrates a significant difference between subject on alpha/beta ratio and cadence. Significant task pairwise differences were obtained for cadence between Task 1 and both Tasks 2 and 5. The results suggest human’s interaction with virtual reality, specifically during the psychomotor task during road cycling. The significant effects on the joint physiological responses ensured that evaluation of the experiment on developed task difficulty in virtual reality was practical, applicable and can be modified when required for training or assessment. The involvement of cognitive functions in response to behavioural mechanism merits further investigation and are deferred for future work.