Methodological issues for evaluation of alcohol and other drug effects: Examples from flight-simulator performance

Individual differences and idiosyncratic responses to alcohol and other drugs present challenges to researchers concerning how tasks should be structured and performance analyzed. Defined scenarios allow operators to perform known maneuvers over a predetermined time course to the best of their abilities, whereas episodic scenarios embed specific situations into more dynamic, realistic, and interactive testing sessions. Degraded performance in the defined scenarios is easily defined as deviations from a hypothetically perfect performance profile, but assessment of alcohol and other drug effects on individual performances in dynamic situations requires flexible analytic procedures. An example of scoring an episodic flight scenario event using flight-simulator data is given, and an interactive analysis system developed to analyze idiosyncratic pilot responses is described.