Diverse predictors of early attrition in an elite Marine training school.

Reconnaissance Marine training is deliberately difficult, to assure that graduates have the capabilities required to function successfully in the high-risk military occupational specialty. The majority of training attrition is due to voluntary withdrawal and previous research has identified certain predictive factors such as demographics, mental status, and physical performance. While some characteristics of training attrition have been identified, there is still a lack of understanding related to an individual's profile that is more apt to complete Recon training. Retrospective survey data was analyzed from 3,438 trainees within the Reconnaissance Training Company. Surveys were related to trainees' military recruitment history and other military experience, prior life experience, athletic experience, self-identified personality characteristics and motivations, and reasons for voluntary withdrawal if applicable, as well as physical performance metrics. Various demographic factors, self-reported hobbies, motivations, aquatic experience, and physical performance were associated with success in Recon Marine training courses. Subjects who voluntarily withdrew from training most commonly cited mental stress and aquatic rigor as the reason and less commonly cited reasons were physical and family reasons. These results could potentially increase training success, but more research is needed to understand the relationships between the observed trainee characteristics and success in elite warfighter training.

Where are you? The effect of uncertainty and its visual representation on location judgments in GPS-like displays.

Two experiments revealed how nonexperts interpret visualizations of positional uncertainty on GPS-like displays and how the visual representation of uncertainty affects their judgments. Participants were shown maps with representations of their current location; locational uncertainty was visualized as either a circle (confidence interval) or a faded glyph (indicating the probability density function directly). When shown a single circle or faded glyph, participants assumed they were located at the center of the uncertain region. In a task that required combining 2 uncertain estimates of their location, the most common strategy-integration-was to take both estimates into account, with more weight given to the more certain estimate. Participants' strategies were not affected by how uncertainty was visualized, but visualization affected the consistency of responses, both within individuals and in relation to models of individual's preferred strategies. The results indicate that nonexperts have an intuitive understanding of uncertainty. Rather than arguing for a particular method of visualizing uncertainty, the data suggest that the best visualization method is task dependent. (PsycINFO Database Record