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Defence scientists are drawing on the experience of elite athletes to help military personnel operating in complex and stressful environments draw on their mental as well as their physical capacities in order to achieve peak performance.
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Physical fitness is well understood, relatively easy to measure and straightforward to improve through practice. But what it means to be mentally fit to perform at the highest levels is not so clear.
Defence Science and Technology (DST) researcher Dr Eugene Aidman has been working to better define the concept of cognitive fitness, and has introduced a research framework to guide the study of high-performance cognition.
This ground-breaking work is supporting the development of training techniques that have the potential to optimise the mental preparedness of soldiers and Olympic athletes alike.
Dr Aidman, who has a background in sport psychology and neuroscience, explains that the high-performance mindset is characterised by the ability to remain calm, focused and flexible in the face of adversity.
"Stress management skills help you to stay calm, attentional control skills enable you to focus, and mental agility gives you the flexibility to adapt to change," Dr Aidman explained, adding that these mental capacities could be promising subjects for study by cognitive fitness researchers.
Whether the goal is getting ready to fight the battles of the future or preparing to compete at the Olympic Games, researchers want to find out which of a wide range of cognitive attributes are most important in determining performance in these complex and unpredictable high-pressure environments.
And once researchers have determined which attributes are most relevant, they want to discover the extent to which each can be enhanced through deliberate practice, and how best to go about achieving improvement.
Writing in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Dr Aidman describes how his proposed Cognitive Fitness Framework (CF2) could be used to organise all aspects of mental training.
Dr Aidman added, "We’ve done quite a bit of work with sleep-deprived soldiers, which made us acutely aware of how detrimental those fluctuating capacities can become if we don’t respect them."
While some cognitive attributes might respond well to training, others may be relatively hard to change. These inflexible mental capacities would need to be selected for – in the case of armed forces by implementing testing processes to identify individuals that already possess the sought-after capacities.
Then there are the attributes with a fluid nature that change across the span of a day, such as alertness. People naturally get sleepy and their capacity to handle a given task declines with increased tiredness, to name just one suboptimal functional state.
CF2 can be used to inform three distinct types of application: enhancing training programs for attributes that are relatively flexible; improving selection processes for attributes that are relatively inflexible; and developing decision aids and fatigue countermeasures that enable people to perform as well as possible given challenging operational conditions (such as when they are sleep deprived).
Dr Aidman noted that there is some overlap between these domains, which reflects an emphasis on considering the extent to which a given attribute can be influenced, rather than simply categorising it as either responsive to training or not.
Some attributes might only be improved marginally with training. But when it comes to performance at the very highest levels, even a gain of 5 per cent or less might be considered worthwhile pursuing.
Dr Aidman said, "Having those prospects quantified with rigorous scientific evidence is the essence of what we are doing. We are producing that evidence that will inform decisions about investment in future selection, training and operational support solutions."
Building on the introduction of CF2, the next step is a study being led by Monash University that is developing an international expert consensus on the dimensions of cognitive fitness using what is known as the Delphi method.
This work will strengthen the foundations of future cognitive fitness research efforts with the aim of enabling military personnel, Olympic athletes and others facing complex and stressful situations to perform at their peak.
