Development and Evaluation of a Digital Critical Tracking Task

A study was undertaken to validate a digital critical tracking task (CTT) that was developed against comparable analog versions that have previously been reported, to compare pilot to nonpilot performance on the CTT, and to correlate a priori and subjective measures of tracking difficulty to measures of tracking behavior and performance. Five pilots and five nonpilots were asymptotically trained on the CTT. The data session included 14 trials of subcritical tracking difficulty (as gauged against the ability of each subject individually). Results showed that subject performance was comparable to what would be expected of an analog CTT with similar task parameters, and no significant differences were found between the pilot and nonpilot groups. High correlations were found between performance measures, subjective ratings, behavioral measures, and the a priori measures of difficulty which tends to validate the digital CTT that was developed for use in future studies.