Sources of Stress-Resistant Performance in Aeronautical Decision Making: The Role of Knowledge Representation and Trait Anxiety

Abstract

It is not clear what elements best “protect” performance from the degrading influences of stress, or how they interact. The experiment reported here examined the effects of trait anxiety and expertise on stressed aeronautical decision making (ADM) performance in a flight simulation task. Novice and expert pilots were administered a battery of cognitive tests, personality tests, and a flight simulation task under stressed and nonstressed conditions. Both groups showed a significant decrement in performance under stress in the non-domain-specific tasks. However, this was not reflected in any performance decrement in ADM under stress by experienced pilots. Only novice pilots made poorer decisions under stress. Measures of knowledge representation were very predictive of proficient ADM under stress. In contrast, trait anxiety scores (equal for both groups) were associated with poorer ADM only in the novice group. Highly trait-anxious experts showed no performance decrements in ADM under stress.

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