Matthew James Stainer

Introduction: Clear and accurate handover from paramedics to emergency department staff is crucial to patient outcomes, but mental workload experienced throughout an emergency response may impair paramedics’ ability to retain key clinical details for handover. This pilot study used a mixed factorial design to examine whether mental workload experienced throughout a simulated emergency response and clinical experience influences handover performance and physiological responses in paramedics and paramedicine students. Methods: Ten paramedicine students and 6 experienced paramedics completed 2 full-scale simulated cases from dispatch, response drive, patient care, patient transport, and handover, under high and low mental workload conditions. Participants delivered verbal handovers at the conclusion of each case. Heart rate and heart rate variability were recorded across all phases as exploratory measures of physiological arousal. Subjective workload and handover performance were assessed after each scenario. Results: A significant workload by experience interaction was observed for handover performance, although follow-up comparisons were not statistically significant. Descriptively, students recalled fewer case-relevant details at handover after a high-workload case, whereas experienced paramedics appeared unaffected, and a moderate effect size was observed for students. Physiological data indicated greater autonomic arousal during patient care than other phases; however, movement and postural differences across phases may have contributed to this pattern, limiting attribution to the mental workload manipulation. Conclusions: These preliminary findings highlight the need for further research with larger samples and suggest paramedicine training may benefit from supporting students in developing strategies to manage mental workload and retain key information during high-demand emergency responses.

Australian emergency service workers, including paramedics, police, and firefighters, operate emergency vehicles to respond to thousands of time-critical incidents each day (Queensland Ambulance Se...

Paramedicine students experience disproportionately high rates of anxiety, depression, stress, and insomnia compared to the general population, placing them at risk of post‐traumatic stress disorder and long‐term psychological distress. Breathwork has emerged as a promising self‐regulation intervention that may enhance resilience and wellbeing while reducing symptoms of mental illness. This randomised controlled trial (RCT) evaluated the effectiveness of the A52 Breath Method, a structured breathwork protocol, in improving mental health and resilience among student paramedics. A single‐blind parallel‐group mixed‐methods RCT was conducted with 98 student paramedics from two Australian universities, randomised to either a 12‐week breathwork intervention or control, with results interpreted in light of differential attrition. The intervention involved twice‐daily practice of slow, diaphragmatic breathing (5‐s inhale, 5‐s exhale, 2‐s hold) with video and guided audio instruction. Outcomes included changes in anxiety, depression, stress (DASS‐21), insomnia (ISI), resilience (RS‐14), and psychological wellbeing (RPWB‐18), between baseline and post‐intervention. Analyses included 2 × 2 mixed factorial ANOVA, ANCOVA for baseline differences, and correlation analyses. At post‐intervention, participants in the breathwork group reported significantly lower stress, anxiety, and depression scores, and higher resilience compared to controls (all p < 0.05), with medium to large effect sizes. Insomnia and psychological wellbeing showed non‐significant changes. Qualitative feedback highlighted perceived benefits for self‐regulation, including emotional regulation and perceived psychological safety and control–although challenges to practice engagement was noted. The A52 Breath Method significantly reduced reported symptoms of psychological distress and enhanced resilience in student paramedics, even during exam stress. Breathwork shows promise as a scalable, upstream intervention to support mental health in paramedic student training. Trial registration: Registered with the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ANZCTR), ACTRN12625000101482 on 30/01/2025. Available at: https://www.anzctr.org.au/Trial/Registration/TrialReview.aspx?id=388884&showOriginal=true&isReview=true

Background: Virtual Reality (VR) can be used to train elite athletes using innovative ways such as through point-of-view (POV) observation and visual augmentation. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine how, independent of physical practice, VR may be used to train visuomotor skills, especially the Quiet Eye (QE). Research Design: In a pre-post design, 42 golf novices either watched a training video in a VR headset that was based on Eye-Movement-Modelling-Examples (EMME) or did not receive gaze training (Control). One EMME variation showed the eye-gaze cursor of an expert while putting using a circle (i.e., cursor-only, termed Cursor), and a second variation showed the same gaze cursor but with peripheral information blurred (i.e., hereafter Blurred). Participants were not given any instructions about Quiet Eye. Subsequent putting performance and eye-movement behaviour were evaluated. Results: The results indicated that the Cursor visualisation significantly increased holed putts, reduced putting radial error, and improved putt line and length pre-to-post. There was also a significant reduction in radial error pre-to-post for the Blurred condition, but not for the Control condition. QE duration increased for all conditions pre-to-post, but improvement was largest for the Cursor condition, followed by Blurred, then Control. Conclusions: The findings indicate an enhanced learning effect of Cursor video training on longer QE duration and improved putting performance, including holed putts. Observing expert eye movement videos using VR augmentation may facilitate motor skill learning through visuomotor skill development, independent of physical practice.

Virtual reality (VR) offers opportunities to train and assess visuomotor skills and sports performance in controlled, reproducible contexts, supporting innovation in research and training. However, VR imposes unique sensory demands that may disrupt movement coordination, task performance, and potential skill learning. This study used putting performance assessment and eye‐tracking to examine visuomotor coordination and performance in VR versus the real world, and whether effects varied by task expertise and athlete skill. Novice undergraduates (n = 44), national/international athletes in sports other than golf (n = 14), and expert golfers (n = 5) completed 30 putts in both settings while eye‐gaze and putting outcomes were measured. Novices were divided into low performing (LPN) and high performing (HPN) based on real‐world performance, while athletes and experts were not. More putts were holed in the real‐world than VR across expertise groups, while experts holed many more putts in the real‐world than athletes, HPN, and LPN, while athletes and HPN holed more putts than LPN. There were no differences between groups in VR holed putts. Putting radial error (RE) was much lower for experts, and moderately lower for athletes and HPN than LPN in the real‐world. Experts had moderately lower RE than HPN in VR. Quiet Eye (QE), the final fixation prior to movement execution, predicted reduced RE for experts in the real‐world but not in VR. Visuomotor co‐ordination in VR may be disrupted. VR training environments may need adjustment to address visuomotor differences and should be designed to deliver feedback consistent with real‐world performance expectations.

Eye-tracking is primarily used as a tool to capture attentional processes in second language (L2) research. However, it is feasible to design visual displays that can react to and interact with eye-movements in technology-mediated contexts. We explored whether gaze-contingency can foster L2 development by drawing attention to novel words reactively during reading. In particular, we investigated whether the acquisition of lexis can be facilitated by interactive glosses, that is, making glosses visually salient when triggered by fixations on a target word. We found that interactive, gaze-contingent glosses led to more and longer fixations at target words and glosses but did not lead to superior performance in recognition scores. We observed, however, an interaction between interactivity and form recognition, with more gloss fixations being associated with better performance under the interactive, but with worse outcomes in the non-interactive, condition. We attributed this difference to distinct motivations for viewing glosses in the groups.