Designing a Synthetic Task Environment

Synthetic tasks are ‘research tasks constructed by systematic abstraction from a corresponding real-world task’ (Martin, Lyon, & Schreiber, 1998, p. 123). Performance on a synthetic task should exercise some of the same behavioral and cognitive skills associated with the real-world task. A STE (Synthetic Task Environment) provides the context for a suite of synthetic tasks. This environment offers a research platform that bridges the gap between controlled studies using artificial laboratory tasks and uncontrolled field studies on real tasks or using highfidelity simulators.