Enhancing transfer of training: using role-play to foster teamwork in the cockpit

Role-plays serve a unique purpose in providing practice and feedback for aircrew team development training in the classroom. When compared with other training strategies, role-play provides targeted practice and feedback of specific behaviors at low cost, with the trade-off being the amount of fidelity it provides. This article presents guidelines for designing role-plays to elicit crew resource management (CRM) behaviors and providing feedback to trainees on their performance. Through careful design procedures, a role-play exercise can provide both targeted practice and feedback and serve a useful purpose in the overall training design of a CRM training program.     

Five minutes after death: A study of beliefs and expectations

This paper examines the beliefs and expectations that a sample of 508 people hold about the first five minutes after death. A substantial minority believed that they will experience the main elements of the neardeath experience (NDE). In general these elements were cited more frequently than were Biblical images. Six percent of the sample said that postmortem survival for them will be a negative and disturbing experience. We discuss these results in terms of their methodological implications for other survey work and their theoretical contribution toward our understanding of negative NDEs.     

Adrenergic nervous system alteration and ethanol-induced narcosis in long-sleep and short-sleep mice

Long-sleep (LS) and short-sleep (SS) mice were pretreated with either propranolol or phentolamine, followed by a hypnotic dose of ethanol. Pretreatment with propranolol, but not phentolamine, significantly reduced ethanol sleep time in LS mice. The SS mice were not affected. In a second study propranolol pretreatment was given subsequent to ethanol at various doses, different for each line, that produced similar sleep time durations in both lines. Under these conditions, propranolol decreased sleep time in both LS and SS mice. These data lend support to the idea that noradrenergic mechanisms play a role in the mediation of the hypnotic effects of ethanol.     

Perceived punishment and reward values of supervisor actions

The study investigated employee perceptions about the reward or punishment values inherent in a variety of supervisor actions. Actions viewed as most rewarding were generally actions that possessed (a) public visibility, (b) tangibility, (c) implied esteem, and (d) long-term implications. Actions viewed as punishing or aversive involved similar characteristics. Visibility appeared to be most strongly related to perceived severity. In contrast with suggestions in the literature (cf. León, 1981), substantial levels of agreement among raters were found for aversive as well as rewarding actions. Also reviewed are characteristics of leader actions that received mixed ratings from respondents.     

Second guesses and the attention-switching model for successiveness discrimination

The present note demonstrates that Baron’s (1971) second-guess data are not inconsistent with the basic assumptions of Kristofferson’s attention-switching model.     

The inference of covert hypotheses by verbal reports in concept-learning research

A paradigm designed to examine the degree to which verbal reports represent the subject's learning was evaluated using a concept-acquisition task. Specifically, the degree to which hypotheses verbalized during the concept-acquisition procedure represent the covert hypotheses controlling category responding was examined. Subjects were required to make category responses, verbal reports, and sorts and re-sorts (blank-trial probes) of the stimuli at intervals in a reception paradigm. By comparing the sorts made during the acquisition procedure, the re-sorts after a 1-week delay, and the sorts made by subjects who had not participated in the acquisition procedure, it was determined that the verbal reports do not accurately represent the underlying hypothesis-testing process under all conditions. Verbal reports elicited at the beginning of the acquisition procedure and at criterion accurately represented the underlying hypotheses; those elicited at intervening points did not. The ambiguity of the verbal reports was a similar function of acquisition trials.     

Linear programming techniques for multidimensional analysis of preferences

This paper offers a new methodology for analyzing individual differences in preference judgments with regard to a set of stimuli prespecified in a multidimensional attribute space. The individual is modelled as possessing an ideal point denoting his most preferred stimulus location in this space and a set of weights which reveal the relative saliences of the attributes. He prefers those stimuli which are closer to his ideal point (in terms of a weighted Euclidean distance measure). A linear programming model is proposed for external analysisi.e., estimation of the coordinates of his ideal point and the weights (involved in the Euclidean distance measure) by analyzing his paired comparison preference judgments on a set of stimuli, prespecified by their coordinate locations in the multidimensional space. A measure of poorness of fit is developed and the linear programming model minimizes this measure overall possible solutions. The approach is fully nonmetric, extremely flexible, and uses paired comparison judgments directly. The weights can either be constrained nonnegative or left unconstrained. Generalizations of the model to consider ordinal or interval preference data and to allow an orthogonal transformation of the attribute space are discussed. The methodology is extended to perform internal analysis,i.e., to determine the stimuli locations in addition to weights and ideal points by analyzing the preference judgments of all subjects simultaneously. Computational results show that the methodology for external analysis is unbiased—i.e., on an average it recovers the true ideal point and weights. These studies also indicate that the technique performs satisfactorily even when about 20 percent of the paired comparison judgments are incorrectly specified.The authors wish to express their deep appreciation to J. Douglas Carroll and Joseph B. Kruskal for their most valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.     

Measurement of eye orientation of monkeys during visual discrimination

This paper describes apparatus and procedures for measuring eye orientation in the rhesus monkey without restraining the head. The main components of the apparatus are (a) a helmet on which are mounted the discriminative stimuli and the optical and other devices for obtaining a corneal reflection, (bj a special restraining chair that allows the monkey to respond to pushbuttons in front of him, yet prevents him from reaching the equipment mounted on the helmet, and (c) systems for presenting stimuli, monitoring choice responses, and recording eye orientation, which are controlled by a LINC-8 computer. The initial findings on eye orientation during performance on both a hard and an easy brightness discrimination problem are also presented.