Expertise Differences in Attentional Strategies Related to Pilot Decision Making

Abstract

While much is known about differences in decision making outcomes related to pilot expertise, less is known about the processes that underlie these differences. We explored expertise differences in decision making processes by simultaneously measuring expert and novice pilots' attention, using eye-tracking, and their decision outcomes in a realistic context. We also investigated how expertise differences in pilots' attentional strategies were influenced by cue properties of diagnosticity and correlation. Fourteen expert and 14 novice pilots flew brief simulated flights. Half the flights contained failures that required diagnosis and an action (i.e., a decision). The environmental cues that signaled these failures varied in diagnosticity and/or correlation. We found that experts made better decisions than novices in terms of speed and accuracy. Both groups made faster correct decisions when cues were higher in diagnosticity. Only experts made faster correct decisions when cues were correlated. Experts attended more to cues relevant to the failure when a failure was present. Findings suggest that expertise differences in decision outcomes partly reflect attentional strategies relevant to problem diagnosis.

Foraging for Handholds: Attentional Scanning Varies by Expertise in Rock Climbing

“…For example, highly experienced scrub nurses had more optimal scanning strategies for the operating room compared to less experienced nurses (Koh, Park, Wickens, Ong, & Chia, 2011). Highly experienced pilots made faster and more accurate decisions and paid more attention to relevant and diagnostic visual cues than did less experienced pilots (Schriver, Morrow, Wickens, & Talleur, 2008;Ziv, 2016). Expertise drives the way relevant task-related visual locations and events are identified and utilized in the environment.…”

The Relationship Between Visual and Auditory Cue Utilization

“…On a separate screen, participants were asked to select the type of situation present in the preceding display. A greater number of accurate responses is presumed to reflect higher cue utilization (Schriver, Morrow, Wickens, & Talleur, 2008).…”

“…On a separate screen, participants rated the strength of association between the two words on a 6-point Likert scale (Morrison, Wiggins, Bond, & Tyler, 2012). Higher cue utilization is reflected in a greater speed and discrimination for ratings of association between the word pairs (Schriver et al, 2008).…”

Towards a Cognition-Based Framework Describing Interdisciplinary Expert Team Processes for Cognitive Robotics in Industry 5.0 Technologies

“…Experts are humans with exceptional knowledge and skills in a certain domain (area of knowledge) that enable excellent performance [31]. They have deep and wide domainspecific knowledge [32,33], which results in a deep-level problem representation [20,34] and understanding of causal relations [20,35]. Domain-specific features are structured in long-term memory [36] and organized in hierarchies of chunks, i.e., a larger information unit (see, e.g., [37]) as well as single information elements, all within a broad knowledge network.…”