ABSTRACT
Complex tasks across fields such as aviation, military, and healthcare require operators to develop highly skilled and automatic levels of performance in response to critical stimuli in the environment. In real-world complex tasks, however, it is hard to determine how to achieve consistent mapping. The research extends the findings from the dual-process theory of automaticity by considering the effects of two aspects in a complex visual search task the stimulus mapping and the response mapping. It extends the traditional view of automaticity by testing the effects of conjunctive search consistency and response consistency. When all the cues were variably mapped, performance deteriorated compared to situations where at least one of the cues was consistently mapped. Several complex tasks require participants to develop highly skilled and automatic levels of performance to achieve fast and accurate responses to critical stimuli in the environment.
