In the well-established aviation system, the importance of sound human factors practice, based on good aviation psychology research, is obvious from those incidents and accidents resulting from its neglect. This carefully structured book presents an up-to-date review of the main areas in the field of Aviation Psychology. It contains current thinking mainly from Europe, but with input from Australia and North America, from specialists involved in research, training and operational practice. Spanning six parts, the book covers: Human Engineering, Occupational Demands, Selection of Aviation Personnel, Human Factors Training, Clinical Psychology, Accident Investigation and Prevention. Looking at the six parts - in human engineering, the reader learns about human-centered automation as well as human factors issues in aircraft certification. Results derived by job analysis methods are presented in the next part and serve as basic information in the design of selection and training programs. In selection, computerized testing or behaviour-oriented assessments are challenging approaches for personnel recruitment. Cost-benefit analyses in selection reveal convincing results, enabling organizations to save huge amounts of inappropriate training investment by the application of proper selection tests. The NOTECHS method is described which helps to assess CRM capabilities in training and can also be used to measure training effects in systematic validation studies. Although operational personnel in aviation are usually able to cope with stress more efficiently than other occupational groups, individual problems might develop as reactions to traumatic influences. Either a psychological evaluation or a proper treatment or both is then required as described in the 'Clinical Psychology' part of the book. The readership includes: aviation psychologists and flight surgeons, training, selection and recruitment specialists, instructor pilots, CRM facilitators, personnel managers, accident investigators, safety pilots, air traffic controllers, aircraft engineers and those dealing with human-machine interfaces.

This book covers the application of psychological principles and techniques to situations and problems of aviation. It offers an overview of the role psychology plays in aviation, system design, selection and training of pilots, characteristics of pilots, safety, and passenger behavior. It covers concepts of psychological research and data analysis and shows how these tools are used in the development of new psychological knowledge. The new edition offers material on physiological effects on pilot performance, a new chapter on aviation physiology, more material on fatigue, safety culture, mental health and safety, as well as practical examples and exercises after each chapter.

Covering field history and discussing actual modern-day pilot actions and tasks, the editors of this volume have integrated contributions from leaders in aviation to present psychological principles and research pertinent to the interface between a pilot and the cockpit. The book addresses the pilot‘s cognitive demands, capabilities, and limitations, which have important implications for operator selection and training as well as display/control designs in the cockpit. It emphasizes scientific methods of achieving this understanding and implies that theories and principles of human behavior are shaped and improved by practical problems and applied studies.

Signal detection theory--as developed in electrical engineering and based on statistical decision theory--was first applied to human sensory discrimination 40 years ago. The theoretical intent was to provide a valid model of the discrimination process; the methodological intent was to provide reliable measures of discrimination acuity in specific sensory tasks. An analytic method of detection theory, called the relative operating characteristic (ROC), can isolate the effect of the placement of the decision criterion, which may be variable and idiosyncratic, so that a pure measure of intrinsic discrimination acuity is obtained. For the past 20 years, ROC analysis has also been used to measure the discrimination acuity or inherent accuracy of a broad range of practical diagnostic systems. It was widely adopted by methodologists in the field of information retrieval, is increasingly used in weather forecasting, and is the generally preferred method in clinical medicine, primarily in radiology. This book attends to both themes, ROC analysis in the psychology laboratory and in practical diagnostic settings, and to their essential unity. The focus of this book is on detection and recognition as fundamental tasks that underlie most complex behaviors. As defined here, they serve to distinguish between two alternative, confusable stimulus categories, which may be perceptual or cognitive categories in the psychology laboratory, or different states of the world in practical diagnostic tasks. This book on signal detection theory in psychology was written by one of the developers of the theory, who co-authored with D.M. Green the classic work published in this area in 1966 (reprinted in 1974 and 1988). This volume reviews the history of the theory in engineering, statistics, and psychology, leading to the separate measurement of the two independent factors in all discrimination tasks, discrimination acuity and decision criterion. It extends the previous book to show how in several areas of psychology--in vigilance and memory--what had been thought to be discrimination effects were, in reality, effects of a changing criterion. The book shows that data plotted in terms of the relative operating characteristic have essentially the same form across the wide range of discrimination tasks in psychology. It develops the implications of this ROC form for measures of discrimination acuity, pointing up the valid ones and identifying several common, but invalid, ones. The area under the binormal ROC is seen to be supported by the data; the popular measures d' and percent correct are not. An appendix describes the best, current programs for fitting ROCs and estimating their parameters, indices, and standard errors. The application of ROC analysis to diagnostic tasks is also described. Diagnostic accuracy in a wide range of tasks can be expressed in terms of the ROC area index. Choosing the appropriate decision criterion for a given diagnostic setting--rather than considering some single criterion to be natural and fixed--has a major impact on the efficacy of a diagnostic process or system. Illustrated here by separate chapters are diagnostic systems in radiology, information retrieval, aptitude testing, survey research, and environments in which imminent dangerous conditions must be detected. Data from weather forecasting, blood testing, and polygraph lie detection are also reported. One of these chapters describes a general approach to enhancing the accuracy of diagnostic systems.

Aviation remains one of the most active and challenging domains for human factors and applied psychology. Since 1981, the biennial International Symposium on Aviation Psychology (ISAP) has been convened for the purposes of (a) presenting the latest research on human performance problems and opportunities within aviation systems, (b) envisioning design solutions that best utilize human capabilities for creating safe and efficient aviation systems, and (c) bringing together scientists, research sponsors, and operators in an effort to bridge the gap between research and application. Though rooted in the presentations of the 17th ISAP, held in 2013 in Dayton, Ohio, Advances in Aviation Psychology is not simply a collection of selected proceeding papers. Based upon the potential impact on emerging trends, current debates or enduring issues present in their work, select authors were invited to expand on their work following the benefit of interactions at the symposium. The invited authors include the featured keynote and plenary speakers who are all leading scientists and prominent researchers that were selected to participate at the symposium. These contributions are supplemented by additional contributors whose work best reflects significant developments in aviation psychology. Consequently the volume includes visions for the next generation of air management and air traffic control, the integration of unmanned (i.e. remotely piloted vehicles) into operational air spaces, and the use of advanced information technologies (e.g. synthetic task environments) for research and training. This book is the first in a series of volumes to be published in conjunction with each subsequent ISAP. The aim of each volume is not only to report the latest findings in aviation psychology but also to suggest new directions for advancing the field.