The visual attention battery: Predicting flight performance with visual attention tasks

The study investigated differences in attentional abilities between student and instructor pilots. Twenty-four student and thirty-one instructor pilots were administered a battery of attention tasks in an effort to determine whether attentional abilities would covary with the level of piloting experience. The attention battery consisted of the response compatibility task, the negative priming task, the inhibition of return task, a timesharing task, an attention flexibility task, feature and conjunction visual search tasks, and a dichotic listening task. Instructor pilots displayed evidence of more efficient task switching, and focused attention than novice pilots. On the other hand, instructor and student pilots were equally adept at visual scanning and covert shifts of attention. The students were administered the same battery after an interval of approximately 17 weeks to determine if flight training would lead to a change in their performance in the attention tasks. The student pilots' performance was compared to a group of 51 control subjects who were administered the attentional tasks within the same test-retest interval. Both groups of subjects showed a decrease in response time in many of the attentional tasks with practice. However, the decrease in response time was accompanied by a reduction in performance accuracy. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for pilot selection.Ope