Military skills often have perceptual and motor components that need to be trained and measured. An emerging approach for doing so is temporal occlusion. In this approach, videos are played and stopped just before a key event, and the participant is asked to make a judgment about subsequent events. The term temporal occlusion refers to the blacking out of the time period following the key event, forcing the participant to use available perceptual cues to correctly anticipate what will happen next. The paradigm has been used successfully in research on sports such as tennis (Ward, Williams, & Bennett, 2002) and baseball (Fadde, 2006) but has not yet found widespread use in military training (Williams, Ericsson, Ward, & Eccles2008).
In this paper, we will discuss the use of a temporal occlusion paradigm to assess the perceptual skills of expert and novice pilots as they land on an aircraft carrier. Videos were created from expert landings in a simulator, and subject matter experts (SMEs) identified the situations that would most clearly require either standard or aggressive corrections in order to stay on track for a skilled and safe landing. The resulting stimuli were used in tests administered on an ordinary laptop computer before and after training sessions. The temporal occlusion test was embedded in an overarching experiment concerning the relation of simulator fidelity to training effectiveness, and it was used to assess pilots’ implicit perceptual learning during the experiment.
Test results were used to measure the degree to which expert-novice differences on the pretest were reduced in the posttest; that is, the degree to which novice perceptual performance moved in the direction of expert perceptual performance. We will discuss the temporal occlusion results from the experiment and will conclude by discussing several other promising uses of the approach.