Poster2 - 07: FAST OR SAFE? THE ROLE OF IMPULSIVENESS IN LAPAROSCOPIC SIMULATOR PERFORMANCE
Bas Kengen, MD, Harry van Goor, MD, PhD, FRCS, Jan-Maarten Luursema, PhD; Radboud University Medical Center

Research in aviation and traffic shows that the personality trait impulsiveness is associated with hazardous behavior. Little is known however about the relation between impulsiveness and surgical performance. We investigated the impact of impulsiveness on laparoscopic simulator performance, hypothesizing faster performance but more damage for high impulsive students.

Seventy-one medical students in their surgical internship participated in a four-session laparoscopic basic skills simulator training course. Based on the Eysenck Impulsiveness Inventory test, we created equal sized high- and low impulsiveness groups for our analysis. We used Mann-Whitney U tests to compare task duration and damage/error for these groups on selected tasks for the LapSim virtual reality simulator and the FLS video trainer.

The low impulsiveness group outperformed the high impulsiveness group on damage on the LapSim (U = 148, p = .05), and showed a trend towards better error performance on the FLS trainer. We found no differences on task duration between groups for either simulator.

The impact of impulsiveness on laparoscopic simulator performance may have implications for professional selection and/or individualized training courses. More work however is needed to examine whether the effects on laparoscopic performance of this trait attenuate over time, i.e. by investigating the role of impulsiveness on the surgical performance of residents and surgical staff.