Age-Related Group and Individual Differences in Aircraft Pilot Cognition

Cognitive Factors Mediate the Relation Between Age and Flight Path Maintenance in General Aviation

“…The deleterious effect of age on cognitive factors can be appropriately inferred from cross-sectional samples (Salthouse, 2010), as utilized in the present research. Our finding that age was associated with cognitive functioning also echoes results from Hardy, Satz, D’Elia, and Uchiyama (2007), who found declines across the age span for a wide range of cognitive measures in a sample of airline pilots. Including cognitive measures in models of performance (as shown in Table 2: Model 2) improved the prediction of flight performance substantially, suggesting that factors such as speed and working memory, visual attention, and cognitive flexibility are uniquely relevant to flight performance.…”

A Language-Oriented Analysis of Situation Awareness in Pilots in High-Fidelity Flight Simulation

“…However, studies involving standardized tests, as well as flight simulation tasks, have shown that older pilots are subject to the same negative effects of age on some parts of their cognition as the general population (Hardy & Parasuraman, 1997), and this has been reflected most notably in communication tasks. For instance, in a study examining the effects of age on pilot cognition, older participants showed declines in psychomotor and information processing speed, attention and executive functioning abilities, as well as verbal or visual learning and memory abilities (Hardy et al, 2007). Declines in executive functioning, reasoning, processing speed, attention and working memory abilities have also been found in aviation psychology research (Causse et al, 2001;Hardy & Parasuraman, 1997;Taylor et al, 2007;Van Benthem & Herdman, 2016).…”

“…Older pilot risk can be explained due to the normal declines in domain-independent cognition (e.g., working memory, processing speed) seen in older age. As shown by standardized cognitive tests, pilot cognition is subject to the same adverse effects of age as found in the general population (Causse et al, 2001;Hardy & Parasuraman, 1997;Hardy et al, 2007;Taylor et al, 2007;Van Benthem & Herdman, 2016). In addition, domaindependent cognitive variables can also explain the negative effects of age on pilot accident rates.…”

Investigating predictors of primary flight training in the Canadian Forces

“…While the CAPSS is accepted as a work sample measure (Woycheshin, 1999), a recent study (Darr, 2010b) found psychomotor ability to load highly on CAPSS performance. The CAPSS is administered at the Canadian Forces Aircrew Selection (Carretta, 1997), and age differences in pilot's general mental ability (Hardy, Staz, D'Elia, & Uchiyama, 2007), executive functions (Higgins, Peterson, Lee, & Pihl, 2007), information processing speed (Hardy et al, 2007), and psychomotor ability (Hardy et a l, 2007). Previous flying experience has also been associated with higher scores on CAPSS (Woycheshin, 1999), and Primary Flight…”