The effects of video game experience and active stereoscopy on performance in combat identification tasks

Trait-level predictors of human performance outcomes in personnel engaged in stressful laboratory and field tasks

Introduction

Personnel performance under stress hinges on various factors, including individual traits, training, context, mental and physiological states, and task demands. This study explored the link between the traits of military personnel and their performance outcomes in five domains: move, shoot, communicate, navigate, and sustain.

Methods

A total of 387 U.S. Army soldiers participated in this study, undergoing trait assessments covering physical, cognitive, social-emotional, demographic/lifestyle, and health domains. Performance was measured through lab and field events assessing a broad range of individual and team-level skills under conditions demanding resilience to acute cognitive and physical stress exposure. Analysis used feature selection and elastic net regression.

Results

Analyses revealed complex associations between traits and performance, with physical, cognitive, health-related, social-emotional, and lifestyle traits playing roles in guiding and constraining performance. Measures of resilience, emotion regulation, grit, and mindfulness were identified as relevant predictors of several performance-related outcomes.

Discussion

Results carry implications for the selection, training, and operational effectiveness of personnel in high-stakes occupations including military and first response. Further research is necessary to explore the mechanisms underlying these associations and inform targeted interventions to boost personnel effectiveness.

Team Combat Identification: Effects of Gender, Spatial Visualization, and Disagreement

OBJECTIVE

The combat identification (CID) abilities of same-gender and mixed-gender dyads were experimentally assessed, along with measures of spatial skills and team communication.

BACKGROUND

CID is a high-stakes decision-making task involving discrimination between friendly and enemy forces. Literature on CID is primarily focused on the individual, but the extensive use of teams in the military means that more team-based research is needed in this area.

METHOD

After a set of training sessions, 39 dyads were tasked with identifying 10 armored vehicles in a series of pictures and videos. Team communication was recorded, transcribed, and coded for instances of disagreements.

RESULTS

Analyses indicated that males scored higher on a spatial visualization measure than did females. M-M teams performed significantly better than M-F teams on the CID task, but when spatial ability and team disagreements were added as predictors, the effect of team gender composition became nonsignificant. Spatial ability and team disagreement were significant predictors of team CID performance.

CONCLUSION

Results suggest that spatial skills and team disagreement behaviors are more important for team CID performance than a team's gender composition. To our knowledge, this is the first lab study of team CID.

APPLICATION

This research highlights the importance of understanding both individual differences (e.g., spatial skills) and team processes (e.g., communication) within CID training environments in the military context.

Cognitive Training: Transfer Beyond the Laboratory?

OBJECTIVE

To assess the evidence of general transfer from training on abstract computer-based exercises and video games to driving and flight control.

BACKGROUND

Many believe that training on abstract computer-based exercises and video games enhances cognitive capacities to the benefit of performance in operational contexts. The basic research in this area is controversial.

METHOD

We summarize reviews of the basic research data on transfer from training on abstract computer-based exercises and video games and undertake a detailed methodological review of flight and driving transfer studies.

RESULTS

Reviews of basic transfer research fail to reveal evidence of general transfer, although a few applied studies are said to show general transfer to driving or flight control. Our review of these applied studies identifies issues with research methods and data interpretation that compromise the credibility of their results to an extent that they do not provide robust evidence of general transfer from abstract computer-based exercises or video games.

CONCLUSION

The state of cognitive training and video game training in relation to transfer has failed to meet early expectations. Much of the research in this area suffers from inadequate experimental control and flawed interpretation of results. We call for adherence to robust experimental design, critical evaluation of data patterns, and replication of keystone results. We also call for a theoretically grounded research effort, and we outline relevant theoretical conceptions of transfer.

APPLICATION

A robust theory of transfer and better understanding of transfer effects can guide development of principles for design and use of training simulators.

Controlling robots in the home: Factors that affect the performance of novice robot operators

For robots to successfully integrate into everyday life, it is important that they can be effectively controlled by laypeople. However, the task of manually controlling mobile robots can be challenging due to demanding cognitive and sensorimotor requirements. This research explores the effect that the built environment has on the manual control of domestic service robots. In this study, a virtual reality simulation of a domestic robot control scenario was developed. The performance of fifty novice users was evaluated, and their subjective experiences recorded through questionnaires. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, it was found that untrained operators frequently perform poorly at navigation-based robot control tasks. The study found that passing through doorways accounted for the largest number of collisions, and was consistently identified as a very difficult operation to perform. These findings suggest that homes and other human-orientated settings present significant challenges to robot control.

The effects of gender, flow and video game experience on combat identification training

The present study examined the effects of gender, video game experience (VGE), and flow state on multiple indices of combat identification (CID) performance. Individuals were trained on six combat vehicles in a simulation, presented through either a stereoscopic or non-stereoscopic display. Participants then reported flow state, VGE and were tested on their ability to discriminate friend vs. foe and identify both pictures and videos of the trained vehicles. The effect of stereoscopy was not significant. There was an effect of gender across three dependent measures. For the two picture-based measures, the effect of gender was mediated by VGE. Additionally, the effect of gender was moderated by flow state on the identification measures. Overall, the study suggests that gender differences may be overcome by VGE and by achieving flow state. Selection based on these individual differences may be useful for future military simulation. Practitioner Summary: This work investigates the effect of gender, VGE and flow state on CID performance. For three measures of performance, there was a main effect of gender. Gender was mediated by previous VGE on two measures, and gender was moderated by flow state on two measures.

Review of Combat Identification Training

Combat identification (CID) has been studied throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, with a renewed interest in the topic in the past few decades. CID research has demonstrated that an emerging set of technologies could potentially mitigate some of the negative battlefield outcomes of failures in CID, including high rates of fratricide due to friendly fire. This paper discusses major CID research and provides an update on previous CID research by the authors. We review training technologies, effective measurement tools in this research, and important individual differences to consider for others researching training outcomes in relation to learning to differentiate between highly similar combat vehicles.

Predicting and interpreting identification errors in military vehicle training using multidimensional scaling

We compared methods for predicting and understanding the source of confusion errors during military vehicle identification training. Participants completed training to identify main battle tanks. They also completed card-sorting and similarity-rating tasks to express their mental representation of resemblance across the set of training items. We expected participants to selectively attend to a subset of vehicle features during these tasks, and we hypothesised that we could predict identification confusion errors based on the outcomes of the card-sort and similarity-rating tasks. Based on card-sorting results, we were able to predict about 45% of observed identification confusions. Based on multidimensional scaling of the similarity-rating data, we could predict more than 80% of identification confusions. These methods also enabled us to infer the dimensions receiving significant attention from each participant. This understanding of mental representation may be crucial in creating personalised training that directs attention to features that are critical for accurate identification.

PRACTITIONER SUMMARY

Participants completed military vehicle identification training and testing, along with card-sorting and similarity-rating tasks. The data enabled us to predict up to 84% of identification confusion errors and to understand the mental representation underlying these errors. These methods have potential to improve training and reduce identification errors leading to fratricide.