Absence of Stressful Conditions Accelerates Dexterous Skill Acquisition in Surgery.

The negative impact of strong sympathetic arousal on dexterous performance during formal surgical training is well-known. This study investigates how this relationship might change if surgical training takes place as a hobby in an informal environment. Fifteen medical students volunteered in a 5-week training regimen and weekly performed two standardized microsurgical tasks: circular cutting and simple interrupted suturing.

A multimodal dataset for various forms of distracted driving.

We describe a multimodal dataset acquired in a controlled experiment on a driving simulator. The set includes data for n=68 volunteers that drove the same highway under four different conditions: No distraction, cognitive distraction, emotional distraction, and sensorimotor distraction. The experiment closed with a special driving session, where all subjects experienced a startle stimulus in the form of unintended acceleration-half of them under a mixed distraction, and the other half in the absence of a distraction.