PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE “Aa CAO O EL a. Bjork small segments for afew days. NBC’s camera did pla ° erate properly so Tom Brokaw’s evening news n0' file footage representing some of the Army’s more st interests, for example, in walking through vallSs a Zen |p | use On. rid ae he commented in kind. National Public Radio “egy w s¢ nted for a few days an interview with Robert Bjork i a jearning techniques. g Sey PUBLIC REACTION he ' | he committee’s book was reviewed descriptively un- 4a | the heading “Briefly Noted” by Sheldon Zedeck if i j 068) in Contemporary Psychology. It was reviewed ex- sit | | | (3 yely by Philip Morrison (1988) in Scientific Ameri- “nd ren We appreciated his summary: ‘“Among the most aicult lessons in science is how not to deceive yourself, Hue | a patient and judicious overview offers genuine help”’ ‘P- | 7 109). Irwin Child (1988), in a review for Choice, com- eu { jimented the exposition of general principles of evalua- “s Fn but noted what he called the report’s ‘‘bias against »xploration of apparent anomalies not yet well attested” . ° " 536). Kendrick Frazier (1988) reviewed the book ex- or rensively for the Skeptical Inquirer, with emphasis on ee | aranormal phenomena. Cn Druckman and Swets received several phone calls and jetters, Many of them complimentary (wanting more in- formation and making suggestions), for example, from + | the Los Angeles Police Department, and many of them »k | expressing concern over negative treatment of particular sd | techniques. In an interchange of several letters, Wilse id | * | Webb argued that we had been too generous to one tech- id | nique, that sleep learning was not worth a ‘“second 2 look.” . | The strongest reactions came as expected from propo- s, nents of the paranormal and these tended to be in letters le | addressed to Frank Press, Chairman of the National Re- e search Council. Robert Jahn, former Dean of Princeton’s it | School of Engineering and Applied Science, wrote that a - | biased committee made factual errors in reviewing his i, experiments on mental biasing of random number gener- n | ators. A copy from Jahn to Senator Claiborne Pell was 5 | followed by a letter from Pell to Press. The,senator was r concerned, among other things, about the’ possible im- 2| | | pact of the committee’s report on the National Science 5 Foundation, which was said to be reconsidering support t of parapsychological research, and he no doubt had in mind his plans to sponsor a bill to create a commission r to study parapsychology and other performance- - | enhancement techniques, a bill co-sponsored by Senators , Gore and Kassebaum and now in committee (e.g., News- | week, June 26, 1989, p. 8). Not satisfied by the commit- tee’s detailed replies to Jahn’s letters, Jahn and Pell car- tied their case to the undersecretary of the army, who responded that it would be improper for the army to in- VOL. 1, NO ApprovueedorFor Release 2001/03/07 : sert itself in this argument and that failing direct resolu- tion with the NRC, resolution could be pursued through scientific forums and journals. The President of the Parapsychological Association, Inc., Richard S. Broughton, also wrote to chairman Press, emphasizing what he and his associates saw as bias in the selection of the committee and an attempt by the committee’s chair to suppress a positive evaluation of a set of parapsychology studies. Upon what it considered an inadequate response from the NRC, the association published a lengthy report as a ‘‘Reply to the National Research Council Study on Parapsychology.” That reply was reviewed in the The Chronicle of Higher Education (Wheeler, 1988) and in Omni magazine (Huyghe, 1989). Similarly, R.A. McConnell of the University of Pitts- burgh wrote Druckman and Swets and then mailed ex- tensively a set of his materials, including his correspon- dence with the NRC and an earlier article by him. Colonel John Alexander (Ret.), one of the briefers at the committee’s first meeting, challenged the validity of its report in the periodical New Realities (Alexander, 1989). We should add that the NRC’s executive office consis- tently supported the committee’s conclusions (and, we understand, put off a potential donor as a result).° THE ARMY’S REACTION Army leadership was initially concerned about the early publicity, primarily the negative treatment by NBC News. Concern was expressed to and within the army by advocates of specific techniques that had received nega- tive evaluations. Field leaders at first showed limited in- terest, largely through calls by users or opponents of specific techniques. As time went on, the army received favorable comments from several sources about the com- mittee’s report and the interest of field leaders increased. One apparently influential event was Druckman’s brief- ing of the army’s Human Factors Technical Group in May 1988; another was the favorable mention of the re- port in the chief of staff's monthly newsletter. In September 1988, Bjork, Druckman, Johnson, and Swets went to General Thurman’s headquarters at Fort Monroe, Virginia, to brief him on the study and to pro- 5. Colonel Alexander, who co-hosted the committee at Cleve Back- ster’s laboratory test of the emotional response of Posner's leukocytes, wrote that the committee denigrated such scientific research by men- tioning also the scientifically unsupported ideas of psychic warfare and psychotronic weapons. Meanwhile, R.A. McConnell wrote that the committee’s mention of Backster’s research was an attempt to taint legitimate research on parapsychology. We noticed that the Parapsy- chological Association, Inc., did not collaborate with McConnell in its complaint about the committee's report and that Robert Jahn chose to keep his adverse reaction separate from that of the Parapsychological Association, Inc. CIA-RDP96-00789R002200640001-7 8
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE _ Enhancing Human Performance pose directions for further study. That meeting, sched- uled for 45 minutes but lasting 3 hours and 45 minutes, was an exceptionally successful event. Thurman’s ideas about follow-on ARI research projects were many and in knowledgeable and authoritative detail. He wanted the committee to continue and gave it a new charter: rather than evaluating others’ solutions to soldier-performance problems, it could choose from a list of general problems that the army would generate and develop its own pro- posed approaches. He was impressed, for example, that academic psychology had insights into training for skill retention instead of merely for rapid acquisition. And he offered to arrange the classroom and field resources re- quired for tests of concepts and evaluation of larger-scale applications. General Thurman’s comment about the generally skeptical or negative evaluation by the commit- tee of several enhancement techniques, some of which he had personally considered seriously, was “‘I was listening to my gurus of the time and I was wrong.” CONTINUING COMMITTEE ACTIVITIES The second major phase of the committee’s activities is now underway. A newly constituted committee met in July 1989 to put the final touches on an agenda that took shape over the 19 months that followed the release of Enhancing Human Performance.® A second meeting at General Thurman’s headquarters in April 1989 was espe- cially important in defining the committee's new tasks. The meeting was hosted by Lieutenant General John Crosby, who has assisted General Thurman and the com- mittee throughout its existence; the presentations fo- cused on current uses of self-assessment and other ap- proaches to individual development in the army, on the problems in maintaining high performance in situations of high stress and high risk, and on the problem of detecting deception. Subcommittees were appointed to consider the following problem areas. Long-term retention of skills and knowledge Skills and knowledge gained in army instructional pro- grams are often exercised often a year later. Therefore, the committee will examine procedures that appear to slow the acquisition rate initially but may be optimal for long-term, post-training effectiveness. Included, for ex- 6. Five new members were added to the committee to bolster its expertise in the new problem areas on its agenda. Michelene Chi, Rob- ert Christina, James Davis, Eric Eich, and Francis Pirozzolo joined seven members of the original committee (Bjork, Davison, Hyman, Landers, Porter, Singer, and Thompson), whose expertise remains ap- propriate to the committee’s new tasks and who were willing to con- tinue on the committee through the next phase. Bjork replaced Swets as committee chair, Druckman remains as study director, and Judith Orasanu is now the committee’s liaison with ARI. 94 ' ample, are spacing of repetitions during practice, : \ stricted feedback on the execution of motor skip (Schmidt, Young, Swinnen, & Shapiro, 1989), ang ‘ quiring the learner to perform under conditions of in stricted sensory input. * Training to optimize performance in special emotional, physical, and environmental states Procedures that optimize the initial rate of acquisis;, are unlikely to be optimal in terms of improving lata performance under conditions of stress and/or restrig, information. Recent research on state dependencies ; memory (body states, mood states, and environment, contexts) may have implications for training (Bjork Richardson-Klavehn, 1989; Eich, 1989; Smith, 1988) Training techniques designed in sports psychology to en. hance performance under pressure may have implica. tions for army training programs. Cognitive-motor preparation to perform under pressure Beyond such training issues having to do with the a, , quisition of a skill, there are issues related to performing at the level one is capable of when it matters. There ar. | indications that certain preparation strategies (such a! mental rehearsal, or automating pre-performance motg;' routines) may prime or stabilize the cognitive motor pro. grams that underlie skilled performance. Such strategies may help to induce or maintain bodily states that ate | correlated with high performance; recent psychophysio. | logical studies suggest that certain patterns of heart-rate and EEG changes in the few seconds prior to the execu. tion of a critical shot or stroke (in golf or archery) are’” correlated with better performance (Landers, personal communication). Models of expert performance The potential of modelling experts was suggested by the committee’s prior review of neurolinguistic program. ming (NLP), by research developments, and by develop. ments in sports training. In its otherwise fairly negative evaluation of NLP, the committee found promise in the’ importance NLP attributes to decoding an expert’s be- havior as a guide to training the beginner. Research on}; the nature of expertise has flourished in recent years (Chi, Glaser, & Farr, 1988) and may provide a foundation for training/performance programs. In addition, com-|: puter-aided representations of skilled performance have apparently been used with some success in sports psy: chology. ’ { “Subliminal’’ methods to enhance mental states | As part of recent research activity employing a variety |: of non-traditional measures of memory (see the earlier!; Approved For Release 2001/03/07 : CIA-RDP96-00789ROO2200640001P RO ™ ’ 4000T- ie sidera cause to litt: the cc ical re serve traine tates great need vidu: there grou VOL.