Doug Edwards wrote:
<snip> fly with people from a different culture (or sex) -- you get the
picture. <snip>
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KH> I must admit I'm not sure how sex will help our flying skills, but I'm
game, I'll give it a go :-)
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But that is about knowledge. No matter how you cut it, loading people up with
knowledge, in the classroom, or through private study, will not
teach them skills. It's a start, but not enough. Skills are only
developed through doing, trial and error, actual experience. Jo-Anne has
supported my argument that attention management is a cognitive skill
re-enforced through practice. Does anyone seriously think that the only time
the high-wire artist at the circus practises is in front of a crowd? Dave
Rogers made this point -- a yearly briefing isn't going to have much
practical, transfer of training effect. Knowledge does not magically turn into
skills.
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KH> My training model, pinched from Mike Bonner (ex OZ Army Aviation) and
perhaps tracable back to Doug, Kerry, or Jo-Anne..., is that knowledge is
transferrable into skill through the exercise of that knowledge, skill
transfers into every day practice through organisational support (setting
values, training to a standard, enforcement of that standard etc.). Again,
from PCT, learning requires that the control loop is exercised. Learning
represents the adaptation of the control loop to form a new mental model that
results in improved loop control (faster settling time etc.). If you are not
controlling (and that includes internal loops involved in mental rehearsal,
deducing, reasoning etc.) you are not learning. If you are not attending you
are not controlling.
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Vince Mancuso has run this argument: Until CRM is accepted as skill
based, it is unlikely that appropriate pedagogic (or andragogic) methods will
be applied to developing the necessary skills. Once more,
talk-listen won't do it, only actual practice. Your capacity to manage
multiple, competing, all-maximum-priority, fear-inducing even, attention
demands will only be strengthened -- and maintained as strong -- through
exercise. And not once a year, or once a quarter. Try once a day.
Keith doubts the efficacy of (inter alia, I suspect) mental arithmetic,
as an exercise to enhance situational awareness (attention
switching/management). But wait. In training folk involved in complex
sport, coaches often isolate a single skill to practice. Shoot baskets
to-day, next day, do only wind sprints, nothing else, and so on. Mental
gymnastics can be used for similar effect, with pilots -- and others
with aviation safety decision responsibilities. Getting people to do --
or try to do -- complex calculations in their head, can be used, in
isolation, to remind of stress effects. You give people the chance to
experience the degraded mental performance that accompanies the onset of
apprehension. In other forms of exercise, you can ask of your clients
difficult mental 'games', and while they are concentrating to do them, you
introduce distractions. (Wear armour plate for that one.)<snip>
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KH> Yes but all these sporting activities contain elements of the real world
task. This is the refinement of the underlying technical skills that I have
always argued for. If there is a one to one mapping between the part task and
the whole, I would expect it to work. The further we move from this position,
the less comfortable I feel.
My problem is the (relative) lack of real data out there that supports the
notion of generic time management skills. While the potential existence of
meta skills in this area is quite plausible (corresponding to high level PCT
loops), I know of no work that firmly establishes this hypothesis. A number
of years ago Danny Gopher did some experiments aimed at training generic SA
skills. In my mind the game (Space Fortress) that was used to train these
skills had more to do with workload/time management than SA management
(although the IP/PCT model would argue that time, knowledge and attention
management are inextricably bound together). He claimed that those trained
with the game performed better in flying tasks than those that had not had
this exposure. Mike Vidulich at Wright Patterson (fell free to leap in Mike
if I misrepresented you) tried to replicate this experiment without success.
So, at best, the transfer of these skills is somewhat shaky (might work
occasionally but not reliably - do you want to spend training dollars on
something that works 1 out of ???). So it really is an empirical question for
me. If Doug's exercises work, then it should be measurable in an experiment
(Dick you must have a bunch of Masters students looking for a topic :-).
Perhaps learning to prioritise is a high level skill. But does learning to
prioritise in a particular domain really just reflect learning the task, or
does it transfer to another domain. Take the pilot and put them in a race car
and they will probably do pretty well (interestingly few race car drivers make
good rally drivers and vice versa, oh dear, could these be specific skills
after all - those that made it in both domains are few). Take the same pilot
and put them on the floor at the Toronto Stock exchange and I suspect they
will be swamped. Take the floor trader from the Hong Kong stock exchange
(probably the most chaotic environment I have seen) and put them in an
aeroplane. Will their attention management skills transfer? So many
questions...
I believe there might be some data in the aging literature that supports a
high level mental fitness argument. Those elderly that have kept themselves
occupied with reading etc. seem to do better at a whole variety of cognitive
tasks, I seem to remember (but then maybe my memory fails me ;-). perhaps
these activities exercise generic memory structures that are used in all high
level cognitive activities. We might reflect on the Bob Hoover case in this
light. Apparently Hoover can no longer perform those logical reasoning, and
mental arithmetic tasks much loved by experimental psychologists (at least at
the level of 1st year psych undergrads). But he still seems to be able to
share attention and manage time stress, in the flying task, as the saga of his
grounding and subsequent reinstatement suggest.
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Cheers
Keith