‘Mental set’ is the conscious determination to pay attention to one activity over another, to use one approach over another in learning. We probably all have our own approaches, which may be more or less conducive to learning a specific task. Over time an individual may find that their approach is particularly good for learning athletic skills, while other may find that mathematics are easy tasks. Each of these is an example of pieces of our mental set.
While we all may have overriding general peculiarities to our mental set, we often can modify our approaches to different tasks to promote learning. We see this with study programs, which modify student’s approaches so they are more successful. Flying often requires reviewing or altering parts of our mental set to be successful. This may be the reason why younger students appear to absorb the material and skills faster than adults do. The younger students may not have to replace or alter an existing elaborate mental set. Starting with a ‘clean slate’ is particularly useful with the more sequential tasks that are a large part of basic flying material. Of course in general adults have a maturer outlook, and this mental set can help them with other aspects of flying.
Instructors must then be looking for ways of promoting a good mental set for learning the flying tasks. This generally means promoting orderly thinking for the sequential tasks, so that time is left for the more complex situations. Particular attention must be given to setting the situation and the limits for the student’s performance, so that learning can take place optimally.
As with learning we can begin to build approaches that will promote good performance. While they often are similar, they are not necessarily the same as those used in the learning part of the equation. Much of the basics of flying are quite orderly and sequential. They relate to relatively closed outcomes. We make turns, fly circuits, takeoff and land and try to do these things as perfectly as is possible. These activities are often best served by orderly sequential approaches to performance and so this is the mental set for performance that we should promote for these situations. When we organize our thinking and actions for events like these, we can do them efficiently and leave time for the more chaotic aspects of flight.
When we have to sift through large amounts of information, to make more complex decisions, we often cannot rely on the more orderly mental set outlined above. In effect we have to switch our modes of operation or our strategies to ones that will be more effective. When we are trying to assess the soaring conditions, to decide whether to continue on our present plan, there are often too many details to place in a series of lists. Some order to this thinking is possible, but often we would become overwhelmed if we tried to approach this task in a strictly sequential way. Usually when we go to these more integrated modes of thinking we require more time to formulate our plans, as these paths are just more complex. So mental set is like many other problems in learning to fly in that it requires some direction by instructors in getting students to recognize what approaches to follow for a given situation. Instructors must learn to become more specific about what they mean when they are trying to get the students to focus in on the situation at hand. Often in the past terms like “concentrate now” have been used with little concrete direction on just what the student should be concentrating on.