Automatic Information Processing and High Performance Skills

Abstract : This document summarizes a three-year research effort which investigated automatic processing theory and high performance skills training. Issues pertaining to skill acquisition, transfer of training, skill retention, and operator workload were investigated with a variety of search and decision making tasks which were intended to represent laboratory analogs of some Command and Control (C2) operator functions. The results of this work indicate that automatic processing can be developed with training in C2 task analogs, and suggest some conditions and limits on both the acquisition and transfer of automatic processing under conditions that are expected to be encountered within C2 systems. The results also indicate that there is minimal loss of automatic processing over retention intervals of up to one year, and demonstrate that the workload associated with task performance is reduced under automatic processing conditions. Performance principles and training guidelines that are based on the results of this effort are presented.