Pilot personality and crew coordination: implications for training and selection

The performance of pilots can be construed as a product of skill, attitude, and personality factors. Although a great deal of effort within the aviation community has been focused on ensuring technical expertise, and new efforts highlight attitudes associated with crew coordination, personality factors have been relatively unexplored. Further, it is argued that past failures to find linkages between personality and performance were due to a combination of inadequate statistical modeling, premature performance evaluation, and/or the reliance on data gathered in contrived as opposed to realistic situations. The goal of the research presented in this article is to isolate subgroups of pilots along performance-related personality dimensions and to document limits on the impact of crew coordination training between the groups. Two samples of military pilots were surveyed in the context of training in crew coordination. Three different profiles were identified through cluster analysis of personality scales. These clusters replicated across samples and predicted attitude change following training in crew coordination.     

Second-order conditioning of the rabbit's nictitating membrane response. Interstimulus interval and frequency of CS-CS pairings.

Second-order conditioning of the rabbit's nictitating membrane response (NMR) was investigated when second-order trials (CS1-CS2) were intermixed with first-order trials (CS2-US) from the outset of training. Experiment 1 showed that CR acquisition to CS1 was inversely related to the CS1-CS2 interval but nevertheless extended to an interval of 8,400 ms. Experiment 2 revealed that CR acquisition of CS1 was an inverted-U function of the number of CS1-CS2 trials relative to a fixed number of CS2-US trials. Experiment 3 directly contrasted second-order conditioning with a reinforced serial compound procedure (CS1-CS2-US) and a mixed procedure in which second-order trials were intermixed with the reinforced serial compound. Second-order conditioning was about half the strength of either the reinforced serial compound or the mixed procedure, which were similar. The present results are discussed with respect to the relative strength of excitatory and inhibitory processes in second-order conditioning.     

The observational study of adolescent gambling in UK amusement arcades

In the UK, excessive fruit machine playing is the most documented form of pathological gambling amongst adolescents. Although there have been a few retrospective questionnaire studies in adolescent fruit machine gambling, there has been very little systematic observational fieldwork into the behaviour. The studies reported explore the social world of fruit machine playing using data collected via the monitoring of 33 UK amusement arcades employing participant and non-participant observation methodologies. The basic aims were to observe the arcade clientele and their behavioural characteristics, and to examine motivations for machine playing. Results suggest that level of adolescent gambling depends upon both time of day and time of year, and regular players conform to rules of etiquette and display stereotypical behaviours when playing fruit machines. The results also suggest that adolescents play fruit machines for a wide range of reasons including fun, to win money, to socialize, to escape and for excitement, and that inland and coastal arcades are frequented by different clienteles, probably as a function of the amusement machine available.     

Improving the retrieval of information from external sources

A major barrier to successful retrieval from external sources (e.g., electronic databases) is the tremendous variability in the words that people use to describe objects of interest. The fact that different authors use different words to describe essentially the same idea means that relevant objects will be missed; conversely, the fact that the same word can be used to refer to many different things means that irrelevant objects will be retrieved. We describe a statistical method called latent semantic indexing, which models the implicit higher order structure in the association of words and objects and improves retrieval performance by up to 30%. Additional large performance improvements of 40% and 67% can be achieved through the use of differential term weighting and iterative retrieval methods.     

The fear potentiated startle effect

A differential conditioning study examined whether an acoustic startle probe, presented during extinction of an aversively conditioned visual stimulus, potentiated the reflex eyeblink response in humans and whether this potentiation varied with the change in affective valence of the conditioned stimulus. Sixty college students were randomly assigned to view a series of two slides, depicting either unpleasant/highly arousing, unpleasant/moderate arousing, neutral/calm, pleasant/moderate arousing or pleasant/highly arousing scenes and objects (duration: 8 sec). During preconditioning (8 trials) and extinction (24 trials) acoustic startle probes (white noise bursts [50 ms; 95 dBA] were administered during and between slide presentation). During acquisition (16 trials) CS+ was reinforced by an electric shock. Startle response magnitudes significantly increased from preconditioning to extinction and were substantially larger to CS+. Conditioned startle reflex augmentation linearly increased with the pleasantness of the slides. Furthermore, subjects showed a greater post-conditioning increase of judged aversiveness to slides that they had previously reported to be more pleasant, exactly paralleling the startle reflex results.

     

Performance of humans in concurrent avoidance/positive-reinforcement schedules

Performance maintained under concurrent schedules consisting of a variable-interval avoidance component and a variable-interval positive-reinforcement component was studied in three human subjects using points exchangeable for money as the reinforcer. The rate of responding in the avoidance component increased, and the rate of responding in the positive-reinforcement component declined, as a function of the frequency of point-losses avoided in the avoidance component. The performance of all three subjects conformed to equations proposed by Herrnstein to describe behavior in concurrent schedules. The logarithms of the ratios of the response rates in the two components, and the logarithms of the ratios of the times spent in the two components, were linearly related to the logarithms of the ratios of the frequency of loss avoidance in the avoidance component to the frequency of reinforcement in the positive-reinforcement component. When a changeover delay of 5.0 sec was imposed, the slopes of the linear functions were close to 1.0 in the case of two subjects, whereas the third subject exhibited significant undermatching. For two subjects the changeover delay was then reduced to 2.0 sec; in both cases the slopes of the linear functions were lower than under the 5.0-sec condition. One subject participated in a third phase, in which no changeover delay was imposed; there was a further reduction in the slopes of the linear functions.