Evidence for Fidelity and cues: how realistic does practice need to be? #

Every substantive claim on the Fidelity and cues: how realistic does practice need to be? page is checked against current research. Here is each claim, how well today’s evidence supports it, and the sources. The full, de-duplicated source list lives on the references page.

Supported · moderate evidence — Higher simulator fidelity does not automatically produce better learning; lower-fidelity practice can be as effective for the underlying skill.

Meta-analytic and transfer-of-training research finds that added physical fidelity often yields little extra skill learning while greatly increasing cost; the corrected claim replaces the old page’s implication that higher fidelity is the goal.

Sources: Hays, Jacobs, Prince & Salas (1992), Flight simulator training effectiveness: a meta-analysis, Military Psychology 4(2):63-74 · full reference ›

Supported · moderate evidence — Learners can acquire a complex procedure as well from a cheap cardboard-and-photographs mock-up as from real equipment or a high-fidelity simulator, with comparable training time and retention.

A classic transfer-of-training result, consistent with the broader simulator-fidelity literature: a low-fidelity mock-up that preserves layout, sequence and decisions can match high-fidelity training on procedural tasks.

Sources: Hays, Jacobs, Prince & Salas (1992), Flight simulator training effectiveness: a meta-analysis, Military Psychology · full reference ›

Supported · moderate evidence — Functional (psychological) fidelity — reproducing the cues, decisions, timing and demands of the real task — drives transfer more than physical fidelity (how much it looks like the real thing).

Training-transfer research consistently shows that matching the task-relevant cues and response demands matters more for transfer than surface realism.

Sources: Schmidt & Bjork (1992), New conceptualizations of practice, Psychological Science 3(4):207-217 · Hays et al. (1992), Flight simulator training effectiveness: a meta-analysis · full reference ›

Supported · strong evidence — Practising under varied, representative conditions improves transfer to novel real situations more than repeated practice of one idealised version.

Variability of practice and other desirable difficulties reliably improve retention and transfer despite often depressing performance during training.

Sources: Schmidt & Bjork (1992), New conceptualizations of practice, Psychological Science · full reference ›

Mixed · moderate evidence — Adding realistic but task-irrelevant cues can foster reliance on cues that are absent from the real task, which can undermine later transfer.

Follows from the specificity-of-practice and guidance literatures: practice conditions that let learners lean on supports unavailable at test can reduce transfer; magnitude depends on task and how the cue is used.

Sources: Schmidt & Bjork (1992), New conceptualizations of practice, Psychological Science · full reference ›