Pilot Awareness and Decision Skills: Beyond Training the Concept

Situation Assessment and Decision Making Conference Pilot Awareness and Decision Making: The Structure of Cognitive Skills

Dr. Thomas Seamster will present a cognitive skill framework developed over the past ten years in collaboration with airline training programs. This approach is based on how pilots acquire total proficiency rather than just a subset of situation awareness and decision making skills. It goes beyond the high level markers by providing guidance for the training of specific cognitive skill types (see Seamster, Redding, & Kaempf, 1997) in the context of pilot skill development.

Situation awareness and decision making skills are not consistently assessed in simulator training, and there are difficulties determining why a crew has problems in a specific area. More to the point, instructors need help in the diagnostic assessment of these skills so they can tell a crew exactly what needs to be practiced in order to develop specific proficiencies.

Airlines have crew resource management skill lists often at a relatively high marker level. In addition to the markers, there are the more detailed observable behaviors (Seamster, Hamman, & Edens (1995), but these markers and behaviors do not provide instructors with sufficient training and assessment tools. A good argument for a more detailed understanding of cognitive skills is presented by Proctor and Dutta (1995) who make the case that the less one knows about the precise nature of skills, the more one needs higher fidelity simulation and training.

This cognitive skills framework was designed to help airline training departments link skill analysis, training, and assessment into a unified process. The approach has been used by airlines to identify more detailed cognitive skills required for good crew performance and to link those skills to curriculum as well as to observable behaviors (Seamster, Prentiss, & Edens, 1999). The practical goal is to help instructors not only identify crew deficiencies in awareness or decision making, but to allow them to prescribe appropriate remedies. References

Proctor, R. W., & Dutta, A. (1995). Skill acquisition and human performance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Seamster, T. L., Hamman, W. R., & Edens, E. S. (1995). Specification of observable behaviors within LOE/LOFT event sets. Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on Aviation Psychology (pp. 663-668). Columbus, OH: Ohio State University. PDF

Seamster, T. L., Prentiss, F. A., & Edens, E. S. (1999). Implementing CRM skills within crew training programs. Proceedings of the Tenth International Symposium on Aviation Psychology (pp. 260-266). Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University. PDF

Seamster, T. L., Redding, R. E., & Kaempf, G. L. (1997). Applied Cognitive Task Analysis in Aviation. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited. PDF