Memory for Attributes of Information Presented in a Synthetic Task Environment: An Illustration with AWACS Weapons Directors' Displays

We all live in a simulated environment. We do not live in a ‘real’ world, but rather in a world of our minds’ creation. Our world is a construction based on our innate and learned sensory and perceptual processes. As a consequence, the world we experience is actually an internal mental representation that results from our sensing and perceiving the ‘real’ world. To us humans, of course, the psychological world we experience as a function of sensation and perception is as real a world as we will ever know. Some of the questions this book attempts to address are how we can construct simulated worlds for humans that resemble the reality we humans expect from our interactions with our environment.