United States Department of Transportation
i
The Effects of Age and Practice on Aviation-Relevant Concurrent Task Performance
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1998-08-01
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[PDF-697.13 KB]
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Abstract:Recent reviews of the relationship between aging, cognition, and performance in pilots have emphasized the importance of considering age effects in aviator skills, particularly perceptual-motor, and memory. One possible conclusion is that flight experience does not appear to modify this age performance relationship, except in aviator's ability to time-share. A recent study involving the administration of an aviation-relevant neuropsychological test battery over two days provided data to examine the extent to which experience moderates the effects of aging on performance. Sixty individuals ranging in age from 20 to 65 years completed the CogScreen© computerized neuropsychological test battery on five occasions on two consecutive days. Subjects were divided into three age groups of equal size and within-subject repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVA) examined the relationship between chronological age and practice on performance. The performance of the subjects in the oldest group was consistently poorer and slower than that of the subjects in the youngest group for all of the measures. There were main effects of practice such that performance after five sessions was significantly better than that on the first practice session. On none of the measures was there a significant age by practice interaction. In the case of divided attention tasks, significant age by condition (single vs. concurrent) interactions revealed that concurrent task performance by the elderly was differentially affected, depending on the information processing demands. These data are consistent with previous reports of experience-based practice effects differentiating subjects based on age and, by extension, suggesting that age-related factors be considered during systems design and implementation (including task execution and training for new equipment).
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