Varying the Complexity of the Prospective Memory Decision Process in an Air Traffic Control Simulation

Operators that monitor and control dynamic displays (air traffic control [ATC], naval radar tracking) sometimes fail to remember to perform deferred tasks. Such memory failures have been studied in the laboratory, but only recently applied to tasks such as ATC (Loft & Remington, 2010; Loft, Finnerty, & Remington, 2011; Loft, Smith, & Bhaskara, 2011). In work domains such as ATC, operators must often consider multiple display features before determining an action. The current study examined the effect of varying the number of aircraft display features that individuals need to process for the prospective memory (PM) task. Participants made more PM errors, and were slower to make aircraft acceptance decisions and to detect conflicts, when the PM task required that target aircraft satisfied one of the two possible conditions, compared to only one possible condition. Directions for research are discussed that should continue to bridge the gap between PM in basic and applied settings.