Effects of Anxiety on Change Detection in a Command and Control Task

Air battle management (ABM) operations places high demands on operator attention; operators are required to manage an airspace cluttered with aircraft, identify changes in amity of entities and respond appropriately to these aircraft. Awareness of the severe consequence of errors in detection and the risk of physical harm may contribute to operator stress and anxiety. Anxiety research shows a selective attention bias to threat-related information which, according to attentional control theory, impairs the inhibition and shifting stages of executive functioning related to attention. In the ABM context, task anxiety may increase change blindness by interfering with attentional processes. The current study aimed to observe these effects in dyads performing a simulated ABM task. Participants controlled fighter aircraft to destroy incoming enemy planes and protect their own assets. General aims of the study were to distinguish the impacts of trait and state anxiety on detection of target aircraft differing in threat, and to test the role of anxiety produced by a mood induction. Forty-six individuals were pre-screened for inclusion based on low and high trait anxiety such that teams of low, mixed and high trait anxiety might be compared. All teams performed the task in both neutral and anxious mood conditions. This experiment utilized a 3 × 3 × 2 × 2 mixed-model design. The between-groups factor was team composition (low anxious, mixed anxious, high anxious). Within-groups factors included trial mood state (Neutral-1/Anxious/Neutral-2), time, and target amity (neutral, low-threat, highthreat). The dependent measures collected in this experiment included measures of offensive and defensive performance in the air battle management task, measures of change detection, and three subjective state measures including the Dundee Stress State Questionnaire (DSSQ), StateTrait Personality Inventory (STPI) and the NASA Task Load Index (TLX). Team × Time mixedmodel analyses of variance (ANOVA) were run on all subjective state measures, i.e. state

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