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.