Keywords

Air pilots, Military -- Selection and appointment -- United States, Motor ability -- Testing, Psychometrics, Spatial ability -- Testing, United States -- Navy

Abstract

Given the high-risk nature of military flight operations and the significant resources required to train U.S. Naval Aviation personnel, continual improvement is required in the selection process. In addition to general commissioning requirements and aeromedical standards, the U.S. Navy utilizes the Aviation Selection Test Battery (ASTB) to select commissioned aviation students. Although the ASTB has been a good predictor of aviation student performance in training, it was proposed that incremental improvement could be gained with the introduction of novel, computer administered performancebased measures: Block Rotation (BRT) and a Navy-developed Compensatory Tracking task. This work constituted an initial validation of the BRT, an interactive virtual analog of Shepard-Metzler’s (1971) Mental Rotation task that was developed with the intention of quantifying mental rotation and psychomotor ability. For Compensatory Tracking, this work sought to determine if data gathered concord with results in extant literature, confirming the validity of the task. Data from the BRT were examined to determine task reliability and to formulate relevant quantitative/predictive performance human models. Results showed that the BRT performance is a valid spatial ability predictor whose output can be modeled, and that Compensatory Tracking task data concord with the psychometric properties of tracking tasks that have been previously presented in the literature.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2008

Semester

Spring

Advisor

Hancock, Peter

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Sciences

Department

Psychology

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0002413

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0002413

Language

English

Release Date

November 2013

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Open Access)

Subjects

Dissertations, Academic -- Sciences, Sciences -- Dissertations, Academic

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Psychology Commons

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