The effectiveness of simulator motion in the transfer of performance on a tracking task is influenced by vision and motion disturbance cues

Abstract

The importance of physical motion in simulators for pilot training is strongly debated. The present experiment isolated different types of motion, a potentially important variable contributing to the controversy. Participants used a joystick to perform a target tracking task in a motion simulator built using a MOOG Stewart platform. Five training conditions compared training without motion (as one would train in a stationary simulator), with correlated motion, with disturbance motion, with disturbance motion isolated to the visual display, and with both correlated and disturbance motion. The test condition involved the full motion model with both correlated and disturbance motion. We analyzed speed and accuracy across training and test as well as strategic differences in joystick control. We found that training with disturbance provided better transfer to test conditions that included disturbance motion for accuracy, but not speed, and that training with disturbance motion produced different joystick control strategies compared to training without disturbance.