Abstract
The Direction Orientation Task (DOT) was developed as a test of spatial ability and processing speed. It is used by several US military services as part of their respective cognitive selection batteries for military aviators. Previous attempts to improve the task exposed an additional concern: specifically, the majority of participants were applying a mathematical strategy to the task, and these participants were outperforming those using a spatial strategy. This paper discusses the development of a newer version of the DOT designed to push participants towards using a spatial strategy. A group of student Naval Aviators completed the new version and were more than twice as likely to employ a spatial strategy compared to a math strategy. Because the original DOT is the only measure of spatial ability currently used to select naval aviation candidates, additional testing should assess whether it is actually measuring the desired construct.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the Command Decision Making program, within the Office of Naval Research, for funding support.
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Coyne, J. et al. (2020). Toward Improving the Direction Orientation Task. In: Kantola, J., Nazir, S., Salminen, V. (eds) Advances in Human Factors, Business Management and Leadership. AHFE 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1209. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50791-6_68
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50791-6_68
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