The Flying Field Characterization Momentum Study

The first goal of the study reported here was to show that FD is modulated by the observer's level of expertise in piloting. This finding would allow us to contend that FD modulation by domainspecific expertise can be generalized to other domains. Then, the second goal of the present study was to find out whether FD would be observed for "true" novices, or whether this effect requires some minimal amount of knowledge of the scenes observed. One of the limitations of the Blattler et al.(2010) study was that the inexperienced drivers were not "true" novices. As car passengers, the novices must have seen the same types of visual scenes as the experienced drivers. Indeed, Jordan and Hunsinger (2008) argued that even riding in an automobile can modify the person's perception of the driving situations he/she observes. This question is important at a more general level because, although RM is a particularly robust phenomenon (Courtney&Hubbard,2008; Ruppel, Fleming,&Hubbard,2009) that has been observed in many different situations, in the vast majority of studies, the observers were not actually real novices relative to the scenes presented.The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of expertise on motion anticipation. We conducted2experiments in which novices and expert pilots viewed simulated aircraft landing scenes. The scenes were interrupted by the display of a black screen and then started again after a forward or backward shift. The participant's task was to determine whether the moving scene had been shifted forward or backward. A forward misjudgment of the final position of the moving scene was interpreted as a representational momentum (RM) effect. Experiment1showed that an RM effect was detected only for experts. The lack of motion anticipation on the part of novices is a surprising result for the RM literature. It could be related to scene unfamiliarity, encoding time, or shift size. Experiment2was run with novices only. It was aimed at testing the potential impact of2factors on the RM effect:scene encoding time and shift size. As a whole, the results showed that encoding time and shift size are important factors in anticipation processes in realistic dynamic situations.