Perceptual skills such as search and detection serve as a foundation for the development of situation awareness, and resultantly, have a range of applications across an array of military domains. From Infantry Patrol to Command and Control situations, warfighters must be able to use appropriate skills to extract information from their environment in order to detect stimuli ranging from a sniper rifle to a radar blip. To date, training strategies research has yet to fully address the complexities of operational perceptual skills learning (e.g., Observation Training). In complex military domains, advanced perceptual skills are an order of magnitude more complex than the simple laboratory perceptual skill tasks described in the literature. As such, there are relatively few strategies that can meaningfully support this type of learning and those that can have not been applied to the field.

In order to identify effective training strategies for the targeted perceptual skills, a Task Analysis was performed to decompose the target task (i.e. Observation) into Knowledge, Skills and Abilities (KSAs). From this, a literature review was conducted to identify training strategies key to perceptual skill sets that could be applied to the field. This paper discusses strategies related to Scanning, Detection and Recognition.