Sensing the Future the Psychophysics as Seismograph: a Signal Detection Method Forecasts the Pilots Training Success

The present article discusses a role of psychophysical experiment as a powerful facility of psychodiagnostics and an instrument of professional selection. The experimental study shows that individual characteristics of signal detection during the changing a priori probability of the signal can be a base for the efficient forecast of success of real activity of the man-operator. Statistical significant correlation were received between parameters of the decision of the signal detection task and values of flight training success of cadets of the helicopter pilots college. Those observers, who demonstrated the most efficient and optimum models of criterion control in signal detection, have shown itself the most successful during the pilots profession training. Success of the mastering by the profession of a pilot valued by means of special scale of “flying ability” and temp of the production of skills of piloting and spatial orientation, and on the base of the character of cadets by their instructors. For interpreting the results are attracted scores of personal examination of observers. Most attention was put to such personal factors, as the tolerance to ambiguity and the action vs. state orientation. The 12-th “Fechner Day” took place in Padua simultaneously with the 6-th International architecture exhibition (as a part of "La Biennale di Venezia" exhibition) in the October 1996. The motto of that architectural forum was "Sensing the future the architect as seismograph". I thought that functioning of psychophysics also could be comparable with the seismograph. Psychophysics can be a powerful instrument of psychodiagnostics, professional prognosis, selection, and training. As the matter of fact the observer acts as an active integral subject at the decision of any sensory task, during which he carries out an integral task and attracts for its solution the whole system of their own psychic functions. The focus of exploration and analysis of a psychophysical situation has been shifted to the integral sensory task and the integral active subject, the latter being viewed as a living human being with highly complex mental functions subject to regulation and permanent development. The problem of individual differences in psychophysical measurements has grown into the problem of personal and axiological prerequisites for the solution of an integral sensory task by an observer a living human being with his own interests and inclinations. The development of differential psychophysics and the treatment of psychophysical problems in terms of the category of task, the model of the ideally adaptive observer, and the conception of man-observer as an active subject of the problem solution (Zabrodin, Lebedev, 1977, Zabrodin, Pakhomov, Shapovalov, 1984, Bardin, Skotnikova, Frishman, 1988, e. a.) made it possible to develop the practical implementation of the results of psychophysical experiments.