Hi Mary Ann,
Our work on culture-free environment for training and testing began when
the concept of Situational Awareness was first described in Dr Stanley
Roscoe's lab in Urbana-Champaing circa 1970. What made a good pilot
seemed awfully familiar with what made a good nuclear plant controller, a
good air traffic controller, or a good site director on the scene of a
major disaster, to name a few of the many complex real-time operations
humans perform daily. The focus was on tasks complexity (not difficulty)
and from there was developed a concept that we claim 28 years later to be
a culture-free environment.
The original goal was to avoid confounding basic aptitudes with the
effect of prior training in specific tasks. We chose to build an
environment where nothing would be like any real-world activities
(language included) and where everything you would be asked to do would
be simple enough to achieve mastery in a very short time (thus avoiding
creating a complex culture of its own). The secret was in the
amalgamation of a bunch of these simple, culture-independant tasks into a
scenario of a complexity similar to the complexity of the real-world
tasks we were trying to predict. What was left out of the equation was
the tasks' culture: the language, the feel, the look, and... the effect
of prior training.
In the late 80's, we started administering the scenario to people of
different nationalities, locations, education, trades, genders, races,
age groups, name it. Ten years and sixteen countries later, we fail to
see any effect of specific "cultures" on the tasks performance. So far,
it makes no difference if you're a pilot or not, whether you've flown in
multi-crew cockpits, whether you're reading right to left or top to
bottom, whether you're computer literate or computer naive.
Jean LaRoche
Aero Innovation