Effect of Pretraining Criterion on Flight Simulator and Secondary Cognitive Task Performance 1

Abstract

Twenty-eight United States Air Force Academy cadets were trained in a GAT-1 flight simulator under one of four experimental groups. The groups were defined first by having heading information either provided by the normal heading indicator or by peripheral lights and second by their being trained on either a 5° or a 10° heading deviation criterion. All cadets were subjected to four levels of a secondary cognitive task plus a control condition. There were no significant differences for either the main effect of heading indicator type or criterion level of training. The main effect of cognitive task difficulty level was significant for most measures. In addition, the heading indicator type by training criterion level interaction produced significant differences. Each significant interaction accounted for an average of 19% of the total variance. The study seems to indicate that training criteria are important independent variables in complex psychomotor/cognitive flight simulator tasks.