The job of an aviation psychologist is to reduce human error during flight. The psychologist must know the pilot's job in order to study his/her performance. The aviation psychologist must also know the pilot's flight tasks because many are involved with pilot selection.
A pilot's job doesn't begin with the actual flight, there are many steps taken before hand to plan the flight route. When studying human performance of a pilot, aviation psychologists will consider a pilot's situational awareness, visual information processing and visual displays, spacial awareness, decision making, attention, workload and performance measurement, pilot judgment, individual differences and prediction and crew coordination and communications.
Psychologists are also interested in expert versus novice flight performance and the differences between their control strategies, visual scanning behavior and decision performance. The ultimate goal is to determine if characteristics of expertise can be modeled and used to more efficiently train novice pilots (from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Institute of Aviation). The navy provides some human performance technology.
Questions asked by aviation psychologist regarding pilot tasks include asking if pilots remember to carry out the correct procedure at the right time? Do pilots understand and remember instructions from the air traffic controller? How quickly does the pilot detect and respond to any malfunction in the on-board systems? How do pilots perform with the "supertask" or cockpit task management by integrating various responsibilities and making complex decisions? When do pilots become overloaded and fail to carry out critical tasks? How does one measure overload?
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