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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2010 Apr 12.
Published in final edited form as: J Exp Psychol Appl. 2009 Mar;15(1):12–24. doi: 10.1037/a0014947

Figure 4.

Figure 4

(a) The airspace management task: Participants are asked to manage the flow of aircraft through a region of airspace under increasing traffic load. (b) Results show that older noncontrollers issue fewer guidance control instructions than younger controllers. (c) Closer analysis of the operational error rates also reveals equivalent performance between older and younger controllers, suggesting that compensatory strategies are used by the former group to maintain optimal performance levels. (d) This is noteworthy because the number of aircraft handled by older and younger controllers is nearly equal, this given that an aircraft passes through an average of four waypoints to reach its destination, which means that younger controllers handled an extra 1.5 aircraft in comparison to older controllers.