Role of Haptic Feedback and Cognitive Load in Surgical Skill Acquisition

Teaching novice surgeons to attend to subtle and often misleading haptic cues in minimally invasive surgery can be challenging. Haptic cues may even be distracting during initial skill acquisition stage. A controlled experiment with thirty surgical residents and attendings was conducted to test the hypothesis that haptic feedback is more useful to the expert than novice surgeon because of the difference in spare cognitive capacity resulting from experience. In general, surgeons cannot perform a cognitively demanding task and laparoscopic surgery at the same time. Haptic feedback not only enhances performance, but counters the effect of cognitive loading, especially in accuracy of task performance. Performance is faster with more experience. With more spare cognitive capacity available, experienced surgeons can better take advantage of haptic feedback to aid their performance.