"Older pilots don't do as well as younger pilots," he said. "You can account for the differences in read-back ability in terms of differences in working memory. So it's pretty clear that if you throw a lot of information at pilots - at least in the laboratory - they won't be as effective as younger pilots in repeating back that information."

That's what got him interested in looking at external aids.

"Generally issues of expertise in these kinds of studies point to the importance of interacting with the environment," Morrow said. "It's not all knowledge in the head. It's the fact that they are very fluent in interacting with the environment to reduce the need for working memory. That's an important aspect of expertise to capture when you're looking at compensation."

Allowing test subjects to take notes provided more insight. Using pilots and a non-pilot control group - all between the ages of 20 and 65 and matched for education and cognitive ability - Morrow's research showed that if people didn't take notes, the pilots did better than the non-pilots in repeating the instructions back. That might be expected since the process of reading back instructions was a domain-relevant task for the pilots.

But the research also showed that even though older pilots did better than non-pilots, they still showed the same rate of cognitive decline. When subjects were allowed to take notes, and repeat the instructions back by looking at their notes as they would if they were flying, the older pilots didn't show cognitive decline.

"So the interesting thing is that you still see an age decline among the non-pilots but the pilots are performing basically perfectly, regardless of age," Morrow said.

Morrow said that pilots' note taking "reduces that cognitive bottleneck that we know gets worse with age. That to me is the bottom line.

"So this study showed that in an isolated communication-only condition, external aids are really helpful for communication, especially for older pilots."

All of the tests were done in the Beckman Institute flight simulator. Morrow's collaborators on the project were faculty members Chris Wickens and Esa Rantanen from the Institute of Aviation and Psychology graduate students Dervon Chang and Jamie Marcus.

Previous testing had shown a 10 to 15 improvement in read back accuracy with the notepads, a number that was replicated by the e-pad studies. Experiments were done with six older and six younger pilots, and with flight conditions running from good weather to severe turbulence.

Morrow is hoping to gain FAA funding to test an e-pad that would be portable and more integrated electronically with instruments. He has thought about adding additional components to it, including the capability to store flight or pilot histories.

Commercial pilots have a computer system they enter air traffic control information into, but most general aviation pilots rely on their notepads. Morrow said some of the pilots he's tested showed interest in using an e-pad.

"A couple of pilots said 'hey make me one of these,'" he said.