Armored Vehicle Recognition Training Using Game-Like Feedback

The effects of gender, flow and video game experience on combat identification training

The present study examined the effects of gender, video game experience (VGE), and flow state on multiple indices of combat identification (CID) performance. Individuals were trained on six combat vehicles in a simulation, presented through either a stereoscopic or non-stereoscopic display. Participants then reported flow state, VGE and were tested on their ability to discriminate friend vs. foe and identify both pictures and videos of the trained vehicles. The effect of stereoscopy was not significant. There was an effect of gender across three dependent measures. For the two picture-based measures, the effect of gender was mediated by VGE. Additionally, the effect of gender was moderated by flow state on the identification measures. Overall, the study suggests that gender differences may be overcome by VGE and by achieving flow state. Selection based on these individual differences may be useful for future military simulation. Practitioner Summary: This work investigates the effect of gender, VGE and flow state on CID performance. For three measures of performance, there was a main effect of gender. Gender was mediated by previous VGE on two measures, and gender was moderated by flow state on two measures.

Review of Combat Identification Training

Combat identification (CID) has been studied throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, with a renewed interest in the topic in the past few decades. CID research has demonstrated that an emerging set of technologies could potentially mitigate some of the negative battlefield outcomes of failures in CID, including high rates of fratricide due to friendly fire. This paper discusses major CID research and provides an update on previous CID research by the authors. We review training technologies, effective measurement tools in this research, and important individual differences to consider for others researching training outcomes in relation to learning to differentiate between highly similar combat vehicles.