4. Discussion
This research had two aims. First, we wanted to test whether TS could distract attention from the sense of sickness and cause a decrease in SAS. In addition, we wanted to investigate how TS affected different driving variables. The results confirmed that TS mitigated SAS. When we compare the SSQ total scores in the no stimulation condition (60) vs. the TS condition (35), a significant improvement of 41% was found. It should be noted that SSQ scores above 20 indicated significant discomfort (Webb et al., 2009) and, in our experiment, SSQ total scores for TS was 34, which reflected that, although TS mitigated SAS symptoms, they did not fully disappear. Previous studies showed a larger symptom reduction using techniques that affect balance ability (i.e., AS for head sway; G alvez-García, 2015) in line with postural instability theory (Riccio and Stoffregen, 1991). This reflected that, to reduce SAS, an improvement in balance ability should be at least considered. In the current study, there was no significant improvement in balance ability when TS was applied when compared with the no stimulation condition (12.52 and 12.16, respectively). Nevertheless, an important finding arose from the reduction of SAS with TS; it was possible to reduce SAS without the aforementioned improvement in body balance.
