Title : Personality , Motivation and Cognitive Performance Funding Numbers : Contract : MDA 903 - 93 - K - 0008

This project examined the determinants of efficient cognitive performance. Specific questions addressed how environmental stressors combine with time of day and individual differences in personality to affect motivational variables that in turn affect components of information processing. Our research addressed three separate objectives: 1) to do systematic taxonomic work on the relationship between personality traits, situational moderators, and activational states; 2) to develop and test models of stable individual differences and transient affective states as they affect the detection, encoding, storage, and processing of information; and 3) to test and revise our models of motivational effects upon complex cognitive performance. Results showed that individual differences in temperament combine with a variety of stressors (e.g., time of day, exercise, stimulant drugs, feedback) to affect two components of motivational intensity, energetic arousal and tense arousal, and one of motivational direction. The two components of arousal have systematic effects on performance on a variety of simple and complex cognitive tasks. Cognitive performance measures examined included complex problem solving as well as attention, learning, memory and performance tasks. New techniques were developed that demonstrated the importance of within subject variation in energetic and tense arousal. Objectives and Overview: Mistakes happen. Even with the best training and the best selection human performance rarely achieves optimal levels. Complex cognitive performance frequently falls far below normative values. Examples of inefficient performance range from the mundane (forgetting one’s keys when leaving the house) to the catastrophic (following improper procedures while performing routine maintenance of nuclear reactors or failing to properly distinguish between commercial and hostile aircraft). Although serious mistakes are, thankfully, rare events, and are thus hard to study, less severe examples of inefficient performance are susceptible to detailed analysis. Our research has examined the determinants of efficient cognitive performance in terms of the combination of personality, situational, and task variables. We have attempted to test