Geographic Knowledge Acquisition Promoted by Map Study and Rehearsal FlightMethods

摘要

Three methods of pre-flight navigational preparation were evaluated, to addressproblems of geographic disorientation. Thirty pilots either 'actively' flew a rehearsal of an upcoming flight, 'passively' watched a replay of an active rehearsal, or participated in a map study session in order to 'learn' a low level navigation route and the surrounding region. Following training, subjects were then asked to navigate along the previously learned route in a high fidelity simulator, which depicted environmental aspects of a 'real' flight. The results indicated that the spatial resource demands of active flight control while navigating in the training condition overburdened any potential learning benefits of 'seeing' the training environment. The route and survey knowledge acquired in the active training condition were significantly poorer than the knowledge acquired in map study and somewhat inferior to that acquired by the passive group. All groups had equal difficulty applying survey knowledge to an unrehearsed and unexpected navigation task.