Three experiments were conducted to explore the effects of adaptive vs nonadaptive training upon performance in a visual target detection task involving symbolic data displays. The results indicated that increasing display complexity during training and requiring Ss to respond actively to the displays were more effective than maintaining a constant level of complexity and requiring only passive viewing of the displays. But there was no evidence to suggest that changing complexity in an adaptive fashion was more effective than changing complexity in an arbitrary stepwise fashion. Additional findings indicated that maintaining Ss at a high nominal error rate during training was not necessarily detrimental to post-training performance. A high error rate was at least as effective as a low rate, where the high rate was reached by increasing error rate in a stepwise fashion.
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