ABSTRACT

Objective: This study investigated whether increased flight experience as a pilot was associated with improved small-scale spatial skills and the ability to form a cognitive map of a novel ground-based virtual environment.

Background: Early-career civil aviation pilots have been shown to form more accurate cognitive maps of a novel virtual environment than nonpilots. We sought to extend this finding to determine whether cognitive map accuracy was also associated with pilot flight experience.

Method: Pilots completed small-scale spatial ability tasks, including assessments of perspective taking and spatial working memory, and then traveled along 4 routes in a virtual environment. Subsequently, they completed 2 tests that assessed their memory for the layout of landmarks in the virtual environment.

Results: Pilots with more flight experience did not have more accurate cognitive map representations of the environment than pilots with less flight experience; however, increased flying experience was associated with better performance on a perspective-taking test.

Conclusion: Perspective taking has been proposed as central to navigation awareness during flight, and the data reported here suggest it improves with experience.

摘要

目的：本研究调查了飞行员增加的飞行经验是否与改善的小规模空间技能以及形成新型基于地面的虚拟环境的认知图的能力有关。

背景：已经证明，职业生涯早期的民航飞行员比非飞行员能够形成更准确的新型虚拟环境认知图。我们试图扩展这一发现，以确定认知地图的准确性是否也与飞行员的飞行经历有关。

方法：飞行员完成了小规模的空间能力任务，包括评估视角和空间工作记忆，然后在虚拟环境中沿着4条路线行驶。随后，他们完成了2个测试，以评估其内存在虚拟环境中的地标布局。

结果：具有较少飞行经验的飞行员比没有较少飞行经验的飞行员对环境的认知地图表示更准确；然而，增加的飞行体验与更好的透视测试性能有关。

结论：人们已经提出，在飞行过程中，以视角为中心的导航意识很重要，此处报告的数据表明，随着经验的增加，视角会有所提高。