Each item shows you an artificial horizon and a heading compass — nothing else — and asks you to pick which of four aircraft silhouettes matches what those two instruments are actually telling you: banked left or right, climbing or descending, and on what heading. There's no photograph of the aircraft to check against. The panel is the only truth you get, and reconstructing the real three-dimensional picture from two flat gauges is the entire exercise.
Why airlines test it
In instrument flight the panel isn't a representation of reality, it is reality — outside the windscreen there may be nothing but grey. Airlines test this because misreading an attitude indicator, particularly under stress or in an unusual attitude, has caused real accidents: a pilot who inverts the sense of a bank angle or confuses a climb for a descent on the gauge, even briefly, can turn a minor deviation into a loss of control. This item type checks whether you can decode the instruments correctly and quickly, before it matters.
In the cockpit
Unusual-attitude recovery starts and ends with reading the attitude indicator correctly — every recovery technique assumes you've first established, without hesitation, whether the aircraft is nose-high or nose-low and which way it's banked, because applying the right control input to the wrong picture makes things worse, not better. The heading compass adds the third piece: not just what the aircraft is doing to itself, but where it's pointing in space, which matters the moment you need to turn onto a heading or report your situation to ATC with nothing visible outside.
For example: you enter cloud in a shallow turn and glance at the panel — the attitude indicator shows about 15° of bank to the left with the nose just above the horizon bar, and the heading compass reads 245° and decreasing towards 240°. Read together, that's a gentle climbing left turn through a south-westerly heading — nothing to react to beyond holding it. Reverse the bank on the gauge under pressure — read left as right — and you'll roll further into the turn while believing you're levelling out, which is exactly how unusual-attitude upsets get worse before anyone notices.
How to practise
Instrument Comprehension is worth drilling in both of its formats. The silhouette mode forces you to hold bank, pitch and heading together as one external picture rather than reading them as three separate facts, which is the actual cockpit skill; the RBI/GYRO mode strips it down further, giving you just a heading and a relative bearing and demanding you add them into a magnetic bearing to place the beacon correctly — practise that addition until it's automatic, because under real workload you won't have time to work it out from scratch.