The Effect of Simulation Fidelity on Transfer of Training for Troubleshooting Professionals: A Meta-Analysis.

OCCUPATIONAL APPLICATIONSPeople in many occupations that involve using complex tools need to know how to troubleshoot those tools in real time and with minimum cost. Training troubleshooting professionals is thus a concern for various occupational sectors-particularly the military, aviation, power plant, and in industrial processes-and large investments have been made to create and use simulators that train troubleshooting skills. In the design and evaluation of simulators for troubleshooting, this review shows that no single level of simulation realism-or fidelity-works best in training, and that the effect of fidelity depends on trainees' prior skill level and the type of troubleshooting system (electronic or mechanical).

Background: Due to methodological difficulties, determining the appropriate level of simulation fidelity for training has been a long-standing problem for researchers and practitioners in ergonomics and human factors as well as simulation educators. Purpose: Our goal was to understand whether and how different levels of simulation fidelity affect transfer for training troubleshooting professionals, with a focus on practice domains such as military, chemical plants, and aviation. In analyzing the effect of fidelity, we also assessed the potential effects of two moderators: trainees' prior skill and system type (electronic and mechanical). Method: We used quantitative (random effects) and qualitative meta-analytic techniques to address the study questions. To overcome traditional problems in measuring fidelity and transfer, instead of using quantitative measures we conducted a qualitative categorization of study variables into low, medium, and high levels. Reports from 1960 until the present (2021) that described controlled experiments were identified using online databases, which resulted in 200 reports, 25 of which satisfied our conditions and included 57 experiments with 1,481 human participants. Results: Although the overall results favor using medium- to high-fidelity simulators, none of the low-, medium-, or high-fidelity simulations were universally superior, and the effect of fidelity depended on identified moderators. There was a positive effect of fidelity on transfer, but only for trainees with high prior skill. The same effect was also observed only for electronic systems. Of the three level of fidelity, medium-fidelity simulators produced the highest overall transfer, especially for trainees with low prior skill, and the low-fidelity simulators resulted in the lowest overall transfer. Conclusion: In designing and evaluating simulators that train troubleshooting professionals, addressing the fidelity question is only possible by analyzing important moderators such as trainees' prior skills and system type. Researchers and practitioners should thus define such moderators and then decide on key design variables such as fidelity.

A model of working memory for latent representations.

We propose a mechanistic explanation of how working memories are built and reconstructed from the latent representations of visual knowledge. The proposed model features a variational autoencoder with an architecture that corresponds broadly to the human visual system and an activation-based binding pool of neurons that links latent space activities to tokenized representations. The simulation results revealed that new pictures of familiar types of items can be encoded and retrieved efficiently from higher levels of the visual hierarchy, whereas truly novel patterns are better stored using only early layers. Moreover, a given stimulus in working memory can have multiple codes, which allows representation of visual detail in addition to categorical information. Finally, we validated our model's assumptions by testing a series of predictions against behavioural results obtained from working memory tasks. The model provides a demonstration of how visual knowledge yields compact visual representation for efficient memory encoding.

Memories of Visual Events Can Be Formed Without Specific Spatial Coordinates.

To what extent does specific spatiotopic location accompany the remembered representation of a visual event? Feature integration theory suggests that identifying a multi-feature object requires focusing on its spatial location to integrate those features. Moreover, single unit data from anterior ventral stream neurons that fire preferentially to complex objects indicates that they have retinotopic receptive fields. It can, therefore, be predicted that location information of features of a complex stimulus is inherent in the memory of a perceived visual stimulus' representation. To evaluate this prediction, we presented participants with a brief array of characters with instructions to identify and locate the solitary letter among a set of digits. Surprisingly, analysis of trials in which the target identity was accurately reported indicated that in more than 15% of trials (i.e., in Experiments 2b & 2c) participants were almost completely uninformed about the location of the letter that they had just identified. Further analysis showed that there were two main sources of these location errors; misbinding the target to the distractors' locations and extremely poor spatial representation of the target's location to an extent that was indistinguishable from guessing. The latter finding indicates that consciously accessible representations of visual events can form despite being untethered to robust and spatially-specific representations, implying that the specific location was either not quite encoded into working memory, or was rapidly forgotten. However, when the target was marked by a single feature (color), there was no evidence of remembering the target identity without remembering its location even with strong masking.