Abstract
Endoscopic surgery has gained popularity due to its minimally invasive nature and reduced patient recovery times. Due to the use of video images and long, thin surgical tools a surgeon's perceptual motor skills can be inhibited. Surgeons need to adapt to these perceptual-motor disruptions before operating on patients. Besides having to adapt to altered perceptual-motor conditions surgeons also have to deal with many other simultaneous demands, such as monitoring vital signs. Having to perform other simultaneous tasks during endoscopic surgery may divert or drain attention necessary for the complex movements demanded by the surgery. We investigated whether adaptive performance in an endoscopic surgery simulator suffered under dual-task conditions. Performance was significantly disrupted under altered perceptual-motor conditions during early simulator performance and the addition of a concurrent short-term memory task caused additional initial performance decrements, but those decrements were quickly overcome.