Evaluation of new measures of spatial ability and attention control for selection of naval flight students
Authors: Coyne Joseph , Draheim Christopher , Sibley Ciara , Foroughi Cyrus , Melick Sarah , Armendariz Nicholas , Burgoyne Alexander , Engle Randall 
Published: November 2024

Each year, several thousand applicants take the Navy’s Aviation Selection Test Battery (ASTB), a test battery designed to assess whether an applicant has the cognitive capability to become a naval aviator or flight student. The battery is comprised of measures of crystalized intelligence (subtests for math, verbal, mechanical, and aviation and nautical knowledge) as well as non-crystalized measures (e.g., psychomotor, attention, spatial and task-switching abilities). The present study investigated three new double conflict measures of attention control as well as a new measure of spatial ability, the terrain orientation task (TOT). While the ASTB already includes a measure of spatial ability called the direction orientation test (DOT), the DOT has several limitations. For example, Coyne et al. (2022) showed that scores on it were significantly improving over time and that the test was progressively losing its ability to predict training outcomes. A major limitation of the DOT is that it has a fixed and small pool of only 48 items. Motivated test takers can, and do, find ways to access and practice the test to perfection, likely contributing to the significant ceiling effect observed in test scores more recently. The new spatial ability measure evaluated in the present study addresses many of the practical concerns of the DOT, such as the ability to accommodate an unlimited number of test items of varying difficulty as informed by more advanced analytic techniques such as item response theory.The new attention control measures under evaluation here are three double conflict tasks, double in that there can be a conflict/incongruency in both the stimulus and response portions of the tasks. The tests were developed by the Randall Engle’s lab at Georgia Tech as improved and very short (under 3-minutes each) variants of traditional attention tasks known as Stroop, flanker, and Simon (Burgoyne et al., 2023). Preliminary analysis at Georgia Tech revealed the tests are reliable and valid indicators of attention control that also predict individual differences in multi-tasking ability.In the present study, we collected data on the new TOT and three new double conflict attention control tasks from 114 Naval Flight Students prior to their start of the Navy’s initial ground school training. We also had access to ASTB scores and outcome data from ground school for all participants. The results showed that both the TOT and the double conflict flanker tests were significantly correlated with grades in ground school, but only the flanker test added incremental validity to the prediction of ground school grades over the ASTB. The sample had an unusually high attrition rate and neither the new lab measures nor the ASTB ground school composite score predicted attrition. While the sample from the current study is relatively small, it does provide preliminary evidence that both the TOT and double flanker tests should be further examined as potential selection measures included in future versions of the ASTB.