Measuring the meta and cognitive abilities of air defence operators

Introduction: This study aimed to understand more fully some factors that influence decision confidence and accuracy related to air defence. To investigate the metacognitive abilities of air defence operators a Within-Subjects Confidence-Accuracy (W-S C-A) measure was used. Specifically, therefore, this study investigated the impact of Decision Criticality (DC) and Task Stress (TS) on decision making, measures of confidence, accuracy, and the W-S C-A relation. Personality constructs, workload and situation awareness were also included. Method: Participants were allocated to either a high, moderate or low task stress condition. Each participant then took part in a computer generated air defence scenario where they were required to make various decisions and provide a confidence rating for each of those decisions. Confidence, accuracy and W-S C-A were calculated. Results & Discussion: DC impacted both on decision confidence and accuracy, with low DC increasing confidence in decisions and high DC increasing accuracy in decisions

Microgravity induces overconfidence in perceptual decision-making

Does gravity affect decision-making? This question comes into sharp focus as plans for interplanetary human space missions solidify. In the framework of Bayesian brain theories, gravity encapsulates a strong prior, anchoring agents to a reference frame via the vestibular system, informing their decisions and possibly their integration of uncertainty. What happens when such a strong prior is altered? We address this question using a self-motion estimation task in a space analog environment under conditions of altered gravity. Two participants were cast as remote drone operators orbiting Mars in a virtual reality environment on board a parabolic flight, where both hyper- and microgravity conditions were induced. From a first-person perspective, participants viewed a drone exiting a cave and had to first predict a collision and then provide a confidence estimate of their response. We evoked uncertainty in the task by manipulating the motion’s trajectory angle. Post-decision subjective confidence reports were negatively predicted by stimulus uncertainty, as expected. Uncertainty alone did not impact overt behavioral responses (performance, choice) differentially across gravity conditions. However microgravity predicted higher subjective confidence, especially in interaction with stimulus uncertainty. These results suggest that variables relating to uncertainty affect decision-making distinctly in microgravity, highlighting the possible need for automatized, compensatory mechanisms when considering human factors in space research

Microgravity induces overconfidence in perceptual decision-making

Does gravity affect decision-making? This question comes into sharp focus as plans for interplanetary human space missions solidify. In the framework of Bayesian brain theories, gravity encapsulates a strong prior, anchoring agents to a reference frame via the vestibular system, informing their decisions and possibly their integration of uncertainty. What happens when such a strong prior is altered? We address this question using a self-motion estimation task in a space analog environment under conditions of altered gravity. Two participants were cast as remote drone operators orbiting Mars in a virtual reality environment on board a parabolic flight, where both hyper- and microgravity conditions were induced. From a first-person perspective, participants viewed a drone exiting a cave and had to first predict a collision and then provide a confidence estimate of their response. We evoked uncertainty in the task by manipulating the motion's trajectory angle. Post-decision subjective confidence reports were negatively predicted by stimulus uncertainty, as expected. Uncertainty alone did not impact overt behavioral responses (performance, choice) differentially across gravity conditions. However microgravity predicted higher subjective confidence, especially in interaction with stimulus uncertainty. These results suggest that variables relating to uncertainty affect decision-making distinctly in microgravity, highlighting the possible need for automatized, compensatory mechanisms when considering human factors in space research.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figure

Assessment of metacognition in aviation pilot students during simulated flight training of a demanding maneuver

[EN]This study adapted the Demand Resource Evaluation Scores (DRES) as a metacognitive indicator in assessing pilot students’ perceptions during simulated training of a novel maneuver. Typically, positive DRES are asso ciated with perceiving a demanding situation as a challenge and with improved performance, while negative DRES are linked to a perception of the situation as a threat, and to poorer performance. The novelty here was to assess DRES before and after the task and across three missions. Overall, students were found to change their perceptions from threat to challenge over time. Also, increased DRES were positively correlated with perfor mance progressing from mission to mission, indicating that the students reflect on their performance as they advance in their training. These findings show that individual metacognitive evaluations of a stressful aviation maneuver might be important for the progress in performance. The results are discussed in terms of flight safety and pilot training

Expert knowledge elicitation in the firefighting domain and the implications for training novices

Background/Purpose: Experienced fireground commanders are often required to make important decisions in time-pressured and dynamic environments that are characterized by a wide range of task constraints. The nature of these environments is such that firefighters are sometimes faced with novel situations that seek to challenge their expertise and therefore necessitate making knowledge-based as opposed to rule-based decisions. The purpose of this study is to elicit the tacitly held knowledge which largely underpinned expert competence when managing non-routine fire incidents. Design/Methodology/Approach: The study utilized a formal knowledge elicitation tool known as the critical decision method (CDM). The CDM method was preferred to other cognitive task analysis (CTA) methods as it is specifically designed to probe the cognitive strategies of domain experts with reference to a single incident that was both challenging and memorable. Thirty experienced firefighters and one staff development officer were interviewed in-depth across different fire stations in the UK and Nigeria (UK=15, Nigeria=16). The interview transcripts were analyzed using the emergent themes analysis (ETA) approach. Findings: Findings from the study revealed 42 salient cues that were sought by experts at each decision point. A critical cue inventory (CCI) was developed and cues were categorized into five distinct types based on the type of information each cue generated to an incident commander. The study also developed a decision making model — information filtering and intuitive decision making model (IFID), which describes how the experienced firefighters were able to make difficult fireground decisions amidst multiple informational sources without having to deliberate on their courses of action. The study also compiled and indexed the elicited tacit knowledge into a competence assessment framework (CAF) with which the competence of future incident commanders could potentially be assessed. Practical Implications: Through the knowledge elicitation process, training needs were identified, and the practical implications for transferring the elicited experts’ knowledge to novice firefighters were also discussed. The four component instructional design model aided the conceptualization of the CDM outputs for training purposes. Originality/Value: Although it is widely believed that experts perform exceptionally well in their domains of practice, the difficulty still lies in finding how best to unmask expert (tacit) knowledge, particularly when it is intended for training purposes. Since tacit knowledge operates in the unconscious realm, articulating and describing it has been shown to be challenging even for experts themselves. This study is therefore timely since its outputs can facilitate the development of training curricula for novices, who then will not have to wait for real fires to occur before learning new skills. This statement holds true particularly in this era where the rate of real fires and therefore the opportunity to gain experience has been on a decline. The current study also presents and discusses insights based on the cultural differences that were observed between the UK and the Nigerian fire service

Resilience and Adaptive Capacity in Hospital Teams

Introduction Resilient Healthcare, a field derived from Resilience Engineering, provides a set of theoretical principles for understanding quality and safety in complex systems. So far, these principles have been used to capture individual, departmental, and organisational proactive responses to variable conditions and how this flexibility, involving anticipating, monitoring, responding, learning, and coordinating, contributes to safety. Empirical exploration of Resilient Healthcare has primarily taken place in specific healthcare settings such as emergency departments and surgery, with specific activities such as flow procedures, anaesthesia, blood transfusion, nurse handover, electronic charting, and patient discharge. Understanding healthcare work beyond these limited settings and activities is important, as most patient encounters in the hospital occur in ward settings beyond surgery and emergency care. The role of the team in flexible adaptation also needs to be explored, as effective teamwork is widely recognised as a contributor to healthcare safety.Healthcare teams are diverse and their need for adaptive capacity, the challenges they face, and their ability to coordinate are also likely to be different. Current research on healthcare teams involves teams that are easily defined, such as resuscitation teams, surgical teams, or teams in a simulation lab. Thus, the full range of healthcare teams and their capacity to adapt has not yet been captured. To better understand how to improve teamwork and safety, we must first understand how teams are already adapting to variable conditions in complex organisations. This includes aspects such as the clinical and organisational challenges they face, the dynamics of the team, how flexible teamworking can be supported, as well as more broadly understanding and categorising the different types of teams that exist in healthcare. Aims and objectives The aim of this PhD was to investigate how adaptive capacity is hindered or supported by organisational and contextual factors in different types of hospital teams.The study objectives were to: 1. Review the concept of adaptive teamwork, synthesising available cross-disciplinary research, clarifying key definitions, and identifying factors that might impact team adaptive capacity 2. Develop an empirically derived typology for classifying types of hospital teams based on their structure, membership, and function3. Identify the misalignments, adaptions, pressures, and trade-off decisions of hospital teams in practice 4. Understand differences between types of hospital teams, both in the misalignments and pressures they experience and in the adaptations and trade-off decisions they make, using mixed qualitative methods in two hospitals in England Methods The study was conducted in three phases: - Phase 1: A scoping review of adaptive teamwork Phase one involved a scoping literature review to systematically map existing research on adaptive teamwork and to identify gaps in knowledge. The primary research question was: What do we know about the structure and function of adaptive teams in practice? - Phase 2: Theory development Phase two involved analysis of data previously collected by the larger research team to better understand work-as-done and team structure in hospital teams. The data included 88.5 hours of hospital ethnography on five different hospital wards. An inductive-deductive approach to data analysis was undertaken. - Phase 3: A case study of adaptive teamwork in England Phase three consisted of data collection in two hospitals situated within one Trust (one large and one community hospital), with five teams per hospital (two total teams of each type). In total, 144 hours and 54 minutes of ethnography were completed across the two hospitals and 24 semi-structured interviews were conducted. The overarching aim of the case study was to investigate how adaptive capacity is hindered or supported by organisational and contextual factors in different types of teams. This phase was conducted in a directed rather than exploratory way, building on the data from phase two and increasing the depth of understanding of all five team types. In this phase, both interview and observational data were analysed using the typology and two frameworks produced in phase two. The England case study will eventually contribute to a comparative, cross-country analysis to synthesise and compare findings between countries and healthcare systems (Anderson, Aase, et al., 2020). Ethics and dissemination The overall Resilience in Healthcare research programme that this study is part of has been granted ethical approval by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (Ref.No. 8643334). Ethical approval to conduct the study in England was granted through King’s College London Research Ethics Office (LRS/DP-21/22-26055). HRA REC approval was 10also granted (22/HRA/1621; IRAS 312079). A research passport was obtained, and letter of access received from local Trust R&D.Results The phase one scoping review included 204 documents and mapped their geographies, fields, settings, and designs. Terminology used to describe elements of the adaptive process were compared. A new conceptualisation of the team adaptive cycle was proposed, along with a new definition for team adaptive capacity. Future opportunities for research were proposed, including the opportunity to study adaptive teams in situ and to consider differences in team adaptive capacity based on unique team features. The second phase of the study resulted in the conceptualisation of: a typology of healthcare teams (paper under review), the Concepts for Applying Resilience Engineering Model 2.0 (published paper), and the Pressures Diagram (published paper). Building on this, the third phase suggested that teams’ adaptive strategies varied based on team type, although demand-capacity misalignments occurred across all team types, suggesting that team type impacts adaptive capacity. While adaptations supported teams’ abilities to overcome misalignments, they also required resources and were more or less possible depending on team type. Likewise, while pressures occurred across all team types, trade-off decisions varied depending on the team type. These findings have implications for team training, workforce planning, and resourcing, and can inform future work that aims to strengthen adaptive capacity and teamworking.Conclusions Overall, this thesis makes unique and important contributions to the literature on both resilient healthcare and adaptive teamwork. It has developed multiple new practical and theoretical models and typologies that have subsequently been used internationally in research. A novel approach combining teamwork and resilient healthcare theory was used successfully to understand and compare healthcare misalignments, adaptations, pressures, and trade-offs in five different team types. The finding that adaptive strategies and trade-off decisions differ based on team type challenges existing teamwork improvement practices, which take a one-size-fits-all approach to conceptualising and training teams. The results provide foundational knowledge to guide future intervention design, which may potentially bring about wider changes in training and sustaining successful teams and supporting their adaptive capacity