Basic Aviation Psychology
What the domain covers
Basic aviation psychology covers perception, attention, memory, motivation, personality, attitudes and stress. Candidates must know the difference between sensation (raw stimulus) and perception (interpretation), the limits of attention (selective and divided), and the working-memory bottleneck. Understand the Yerkes-Dodson curve: performance rises with arousal to an optimum, then falls.
Concepts to master
- Perception: expectation and experience shape what we see; this explains illusions and misread instruments.
- Attention: vigilance decrements over time; channel capacity is limited; task shedding occurs under load.
- Memory: sensory, short-term (working) and long-term; chunking increases capacity; interference causes forgetting.
- Motivation and stress: Maslow's hierarchy, intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation; acute versus chronic stress.
- Attitudes and behaviour: the hazardous attitudes (anti-authority, impulsivity, invulnerability, macho, resignation) and their antidotes.
Question traps
A common trap is confusing 'vigilance decrement' (decline in detection of rare signals over time) with 'habituation'. Another is the claim that highly motivated people make fewer errors under high stress; the Yerkes-Dodson curve says otherwise beyond the optimum. Also remember that perception is an active construction, not a passive recording.
Worked example / rule of thumb
A pilot misses a warning light during a long cruise. This is a vigilance decrement, not a perceptual illusion. Rule of thumb: rare, monotonous signals are missed because attention decays with time on task, so use checklists and automated alerts to compensate.