Beatriz Gil-Gómez de Liaño¹, David Pascual-Ezama; ¹Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, ²Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Virtual Reality (VR) has changed science in the last decade, significantly transforming applied sciences, industrial settings, and society. In the present work, we adapted ANTI-V (Roca et al., 2011) and ANTI-VEA (Luna et al., 2018) experimental tasks based on Posner’s theory to develop a behavioral assessment in the industry using VR: We created a VR real-world-like task for human resource selection and occupational risk prevention in which participants had to maintain a proper tank pressure by manipulating key-pressure tools arrow-like shaped, in a similar way as in ANTI-VEA Posner tasks. We run participants in different 2-D (n=38) and 3-D VR (n=30) tasks, getting measures of visual selective attention, visual attentional capture, auditory attentional capture and vigilance. The results validated classic Posner effects for measuring these variables within a VR industry selection task, showing the potential of VR in applied psychology using experimentally validated paradigms in cognitive attention science.