Training Decision Making in Sports Using Immersive Technologies: A Scoping Review

There is wide interest in using technologies to enhance the training of sports-specific skills. One promising immersive technology is virtual reality (VR) because it can provide the athlete with rich, immersive, and representative scenarios. The key question is whether training with these systems will transfer to real-world performance. This scoping review examines the existing literature on using VR to improve sports decision-making. We identified 25 papers that used VR (which was very broadly defined by researchers) to train decision-making, and evaluated them with respect to transfer using the Modified Perceptual Training Framework (MPTF: Hadlow et al., 2018). In general research is taking advantage of VR’s ability to provide realistic environment, however many papers still rely on simple, non-representative actions from the athletes. Importantly, only six papers assessed transfer of training to real world behaviour; given that transfer is the purpose of this training, this is a strong limitation on the developing evidence. The existing work does show that VR is worth investigating, so we make a series of recommendations to strengthen future research, with an emphasis on always measuring transfer and doing so guided by ecological approaches such as task dynamics (e.g. Leach et al., 2021a, b) and the MPTF.