2.6 Perception and Understanding

Most people tend to form quick impressions of others and stick to these early impressions. They make rapid guesses about physical attributes, ability, and personality (all qualities that are difficult to assess reliably). Where there are "gaps" they tend to fill them in, and easily use descriptive words like "self-conscious", "defensive", "aggressive", or "inferiority complex".

Whether formed consciously or unconsciously, the first impression of other people is very powerful. People help form these impressions from a range of previous experience, presumptions, expectations, and attitudes, and they make any new experience fit with old experience.

Attitudes have been influenced by many significant people: relations, teachers, friends, peers, and others whose views were important at the time.

#The value system filter

By the time we are adult and working, most of us have a fairly set "value system." Because we find it difficult to abandon these attitudes, we presume that they are based on logic and then tend to reject data that does not fit. Faced with strong arguments that conflict with our views we become emotional and stressed.

It is worth remembering that all the time we are categorising people from initial perceptions (probably supported by the fact that their subsequent behaviour fulfilled our anticipation), they of course have categorised and labelled us in return.

#The senses: how perception is built

Perceptions are formed through the use of our senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste.

Perception material gives an approximate channel-share for non-verbal communication:

#Sight: the body-language channel

Examples of "body language" the instructor should be aware of, in themselves and in trainees:

• Posture: standing tall indicates commanding authority.
• Appearance: if attractive, makes us feel favourable towards them.
• Expressions and gestures: can make us feel close or alien.
• Proximity: too close may be threatening to us.
• Eye contact: frank or shifty; staring can be a threat.

Sight dominates because it carries the most data per unit of attention: posture, gesture, expression, eye-line, and physical orientation are all read continuously and pre-consciously by the receiver. The instructor whose body language signals impatience, indifference, or threat is sending a signal that the trainee receives even when no word is spoken; the instructor whose body language signals interest, openness, and respect creates the conditions for the trainee to engage. The 75% figure is an approximation but the underlying point is robust: most communication is non-verbal, and most of the non-verbal load is visual.

#Hearing

Hearing carries roughly 15% of non-verbal communication: vocabulary, language, and tone may vary depending on the group being addressed, in order to stress things in common (or perhaps the inverse). The instructor's voice modulation (pace, pitch, volume, and prosody) is part of the signal even before the words are processed. A flat monotone signals disengagement; an over-energetic delivery signals lack of seriousness; a calibrated, varied delivery signals engagement and competence.

#Touch

Touch is generally reserved for loved ones or more trusted friends. Workplaces tend to suppress touch as it seems to be an invasion of private space. In flight-training contexts the touch channel is essentially unused except for incidental moments (a handshake at the start and end of a session); the instructor should not use touch as a communication channel and should respect the trainee's space.

#Smell and taste

Smell and taste influence to a lesser degree but should not be underestimated, particularly if we sense something pleasant or offensive. Cultural issues may arise should one react differently to people who smell of perfume, tobacco, curry, or garlic. Cultural neutrality is part of the professional discipline.

#Understanding: from sense to mental model

Understanding comes from the senses to form a mental model, which can then be used for comparisons and to work from.

Understanding in order to be able to perform a task may be broken down into three components: knowledge, skill, and attitude.

This is the KSA framework that runs throughout the EBT and competency-based-training literature. The three components are independent in the sense that a person can have any combination: knowledge without skill (the textbook expert who has never flown the manoeuvre), skill without knowledge (the experienced operator who has never been told the why), knowledge and skill without attitude (the capable pilot who chooses not to comply). Competence, in the EBT framing, requires all three.

#Categories of knowledge

Perception material identifies four categories of knowledge:

• Facts.
• Procedures.
• Concepts.
• Principles.

Facts are discrete items of information (V-speeds, aircraft limits, ATC frequencies). Procedures are sequences of actions (the engine-fire drill, the approach checklist). Concepts are categories of related ideas (what an "approach gate" is, what "stabilised" means). Principles are general rules that apply across many specific cases (energy management, the law of conservation of momentum as it applies to mass and braking).

The categories are progressive in abstraction: facts are concrete, procedures are sequences of facts, concepts are categories that group facts and procedures, and principles are the underlying rules from which procedures can be derived. The instructional implication is that teaching at the right level matters: a trainee who has the principles can derive the procedures and remember the facts; a trainee who has only memorised the facts cannot derive the procedures and will fail when the exact memorised case is not the one in front of them. Competency-based training emphasises the principle and concept levels because they transfer; rote-fact training does not.

#Categories of skill

Skills can also be considered as falling into four categories:

• Thinking skills are the outcome of procedure knowledge.
• Acting skills, also known as motor skills (e.g. typing).
• Reacting skills are the ability to control our behaviour.
• Interacting skills enable us to work with others.

Thinking skills are the cognitive skills this section has been describing throughout: pattern recognition, decision-making, anticipation. Acting (motor) skills are the physical skills of stick-and-rudder flying. Reacting skills are emotional self-regulation: maintaining composure under stress, suppressing the urge to dispute an ATC instruction, controlling temper when a trainee has just done the wrong thing for the third time. Interacting skills are the crew-level competencies: communication, leadership, mutual support, conflict resolution.

Pilot competence requires all four. The competency framework reproduced in the cluster's competency appendices decomposes pilot performance against indicators that pull from all four skill categories: handling skills are acting; procedure execution is thinking on rule-based foundations; workload and stress management are reacting; communication, leadership, teamwork, and CRM are interacting.

#Attitudes

Attitudes are important for the successful performance of many kinds of work. However, in training terms, our knowledge of how to develop appropriate attitudes is limited: it boils down to giving trainees knowledge of why the attitudes required are important and exhorting them to adopt those attitudes or react appropriately in certain situations. This latter becomes part of reacting skills, which involve control of feeling, habits, and emotions when these would otherwise lead us to behave in a manner inappropriate to the objective of our task.

The reason attitudes are hard to teach by direct instruction is that the trainee already has attitudes from the [[#The value system filter|value system filter]] above; the instructor cannot simply tell them to have different ones. What the instructor can do is:

• Give the trainee the knowledge of why a different attitude would produce a better outcome (the cognitive content).
• Provide experience in which the new attitude can be exercised and the better outcome is observed (the experiential evidence).
• Reinforce the new attitude when it appears (the conditioning).
• Use facilitation to surface the trainee's current attitude into their own awareness, where it becomes available for revision (the reflective component).

The facilitation contribution is what the 7.3 General Debrief Techniques develops at length. Attitudes that the trainee has not surfaced into awareness cannot be revised; attitudes that the instructor lectures about cannot be adopted on command. The discovery loop is what makes attitudinal change durable.

#Connections

• 2.5 Needs. The motivation framing that determines whether the trainee is bringing the attention required for perception to operate.
• 2.7 Human Information Processing and Memory. The cognitive architecture in which perception is the second stage (after sensory reception).
• 2.3 Behaviour. The behaviour categories (skill, rule, knowledge) align with the knowledge categories (facts, procedures, concepts, principles) and skill categories developed here.
• Core competencies. The KSA decomposition is the foundation of the competency framework.
• 1.5 Knowledge Objectives. Operationalises the knowledge component of the KSA model into specific session-level objectives.
• Facilitation. The technique that surfaces and revises attitudes once the trainee owns them.