Stage of manual skill acquisition with Simodont virtual reality simulator for pre-clinical dental training: an interventional matching study

Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of virtual reality (VR) simulators in dental education. However, these studies primarily focused on the early stages of psychomotor skill acquisition and often did not account for confounding variables when assigning participants to study groups. The present study aims to determine the stage of manual skill acquisition at which VR simulator training is most effective, using a matched interventional study design. A planned crossover study with a matched design was conducted among 70 undergraduate dental students from Tel Aviv University. Matching was performed based on age, gender, dominant hand, spatial perception, and fine motor skills. To evaluate manual performance under both direct vision (Class I cavity preparation) and indirect vision (Class 1 occlusal-proximal [OP] preparation), students were evenly assigned to two groups (Group 1 and Group 2), matched to control for potential confounding factors. Using a crossover approach, each group alternated roles as the experimental or control group for the two phantom-based tasks. The experimental group trained with both the Simodont virtual reality simulator and the conventional phantom simulator, while the control group practiced solely with the conventional simulator on plastic teeth. The experimental group was further subdivided into three subgroups based on the timing of Simodont exposure corresponding to different stages of skill acquisition: cognitive, associative, and autonomous. No statistically significant differences were observed between the experimental and control groups in manual performance scores under direct vision (p = 0.461) or indirect vision (p = 0.916). Additionally, no significant differences were found among the three experimental subgroups representing different stages of skill acquisition (p > 0.05). The integration of the Simodont simulator during the preclinical year does not appear to enhance dental students’ manual performance under either direct or indirect vision conditions.