The psychomotor subtests measure the coordination and workload-management skills that flying demands: doing several simple things at once, accurately, while the workload keeps rising.
What to expect
Hand-eye coordination tasks, typically tracking a moving target with a joystick while responding to secondary signals.
Complex choice reaction: responding quickly and correctly to combinations of visual and acoustic stimuli, where wrong responses cost more than slow ones.
The cockpit coordination task (prep vendors call it MIC), the day's centrepiece in its publicly documented form: a basic-T instrument panel — heading, speed and altitude with target bugs, plus a thrust indicator and clock — flown to commanded values with the stick while spoken digits run in your headphones: three even numbers in a row demand the green button, three odd the red. Balanced performance across every channel beats brilliance at one.
A multitasking combination in the style introduced in 2010: a tracking task, visual monitoring and acoustic monitoring running at the same time on one screen.
How to prepare
Multitasking is trainable. Build a scanning rhythm instead of fixating on one sub-task, learn to prioritise the primary task the moment workload spikes, and accept small errors on secondary tasks rather than letting one mistake cascade. On the practice page, the Instrument Coordination Test reproduces the publicly documented cockpit-coordination format — instruments, stick and the even/odd audio rule together — and the Auditory Detection Test isolates that audio rule so you can automate it before facing it under load. Hand-Eye-Foot Coordination, Complex Choice Reaction, the Determination Test, the Multitasking Test and Path Following train the remaining demands. Practise in longer sessions to simulate fatigue: your performance in the final third of a session is the best predictor of how you will hold up in the real test.