I need help...not sure what psychological/psychometric tests I should be looking at. I come from an engineering background and my lecturer asked me to get help with this before contacting the psychology department.

I am working on my research proposal for a MSc research degree and I want to carry out psychological/metric tests to see if hyperglycaemia (high blood glucose levels) affects the mental state ability of airline pilots when compare to normal blood glucose levels.

These are the mental attributes that pilots need:

hand eye co-ordination
long term/short term memory use
intelligence,
problem solving skills,
performance under pressure
numerical processing
motor skills
decision making

-THERE MAYBE SOME I HAVENT THOUGHT OF...?

What tests are there in existence which I can use to explore these options?

Many thanks

Karl

May I ask something probably really stupid?
How are you going to test these? And how are you going to find participants for your research?
I think it is quite tricky and I don't think that pilots would want to participate in a reserach that may show that they have problems for e.g. with hand eye co-ordination, as this may cause further problems to them....
Maybe I am wrong!

Hi,

I have use of a Civil Aviation Authority certified simulator, this will be used to a)allow the subjects to complete a series of tasks under a normal glucose range then b) attempt to cause stressful emergencies/high workload situations to induce hyperglycaemia during a series of flight tasks and then c) I will also use the simulator to test performance when we manually induce hyperglycaemia with oral glucose agents, again making the pilots carry out a series of flight tasks.

Finally the above tests which I need help with will be done on a computer away from the simulator due to time restrictions and equipment space on board the simulator. These tests will be carried out under the same protocol of: normal range then induced with oral glucose agents for a comparision. EEG and ECG data will be collected as well as the test results themselves.

I am in contact with over 15 former pilots who have lost their piloting careers through type 1 diabetes.

What do you think then? =) (up) or (down)

to be honest I had thought that too.

From my own knowledge in a previous existence (!!) pilots go through pretty rigorous psych type testing during the course of their training. They are often asked intrusive questions to see how they get on, eg I know one guy who was asked how the recent death of his mother affected him and he was given quite a grilling. Unless you can give a cast iron guarantee of anonymity you might find it hard to get participants. Will your results be given to aviation authorities or the airlines of participating pilots. Ethically, if you do find pilots are affected, are you be obliged to contact the airlines for health and safety purposes?? I would imagine pilots would be very wary of being identified in this way.

It's a tough one in my opinion

A

sorry just see your reply to your first reply now, you must have been posting when I was typing up mine!

======= Date Modified 11 Jan 2011 09:33:36 =======
You beat me too it :-)


Ady... in my previous reply before you commented.

"I am in contact with over 15 FORMER pilots who have lost their piloting careers through type 1 diabetes".
They are all willing and their condition allows hyperglycaemia to be induced easier.
:-)

Hi Emmaki and Karlb123

In this research the idea is not to really see if the pilot has a good hand eye coordination or not...the main aim is to see how glucose levels affect the mental state of the pilots. Karl, I think that it will be more interesting to compare hypoglycemic, normal and hyperglycemic. Look at all the 3 conditions. But for this I would assume that you first need to confirm with the blood tests if the pilot has which of these 3 conditions and then correlate his qualiative answers with the specific reading of his blood glucose (quantitative).

however, I'm not sure how you are planning to recruit your participants? you probably need to contact the Aviation industry and get their approval. Then it will be very tricky to actually publish your results because like Emmaki said, if for example you found out in your results that most of the pilots were hypoglycemic before take off or while they were on duty then this would mean that it impairs their decision making. But how would you publish this? your results could mean that the pilots couldnt be efiicient at work. This could make the aviation industry in more trouble than it is already in these days!

So, I think if you have the freedom to change this topic then look at another potential group of focus...such as students in nursery, highschool and how hypo/hyper/normal glycemic conditions affects their concentration in the class and their performance?

Good luck!

AJ

Hi Ariajolie,

I cannot go near hypoglycaemia any more. This was my initial idea but my supervisor spoke with the ethics committee who ruled it out due to safety etc Instead they suggested hyperglycaemia.

The candidates...will all have medical license excluding type 1 diabetes which has put an end to their career as a pilot. This will not affect those pilots in service except if someone attempts to draw comparisons from the stress induced hyperglycaemia or how say a heavy meal in flight has an affect. I ALREADY have the candidates so I wont need to hunt any down.

I don't really want to change the focus... I am a graduate who was going to be an airline pilot till 2007 when I myself became type 1 diabetic. I have now refocused my sights on a career in medicine (graduate entry medicine) and this research was a way of taking a transitional step from my aerospace engineering degree into something a bit different prior to medicine.

Neuropsychological Assessment by Lezak is a good place to find out about what tests are out there for these mental attributes. Might be worth looking if there is a copy in your library.

I'd also think sustained attention would be a good thing to look at. I use a Rapid Visual Information Processing task in my cognitive test battery, which I vaguely remember reading was developed to test abilities of pilots....but now have no idea what or where the source for the information was!

Another thought, I may have mis-understood, but if you have access to a simulator wouldn't it complicate the study to look at cognitive performance rather than simply comparing flying performance in the simulator?...thought I guess you can always correlate cognition with simulator performance to add strength to your arguements.