ABSTRACT
Today’s battlefield is a dynamic environment, filled with subtle physical, psychological, and social threats. Modern military personnel must not only possess typical warfighting abilities, but they must also be able to rapidly perceive, understand, and then respond to a range of ambiguous stimuli, including nuanced social and cultural indicators. In order to help military personnel-particularly enlisted ground forces-manage such threats, we are exploring advanced perceptual training for complex urban spaces. Broadly, the goals of this research effort are twofold: First, we seek to address immediate gaps in contemporary Marine Corps training by developing, testing, and ultimately delivering a suite of instructional methodologies and technologies that enhance the training of advanced perceptual skills. Second, we are investigating emerging Science and Technology (S&T) challenges, including the categorization of militarily relevant culturally situated cues, the modeling of sociocultural patterns of life, and development of associated instructional methods and performance metrics. This session comprises representatives from the multidisciplinary Perceptual Training Systems and Tools (PercepTS) team, and this paper establishes the context and rationale for the combined effort. It discuss the status quo of Marine Corps perceptual training, offers general guidance about perceptual training drawn from the literature, and outlines our team’s unified approach to addressing the these research challenges.
