What You Lookin' At!?

The importance of educating attention

Publication

Murray, N. P., Lewinski, W., Sandri Heidner, G., Lawton, J., & Horn, R. (2024). Gaze Control and Tactical Decision-Making Under Stress in Active-Duty Police Officers During a Live Use-of-Force Response. Journal of Motor Behavior, 56(1), 30–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/00222895.2023.2229946

What Was the Issue?

Police officers often need to make critical decisions very quickly. To make those decisions, officers must have information that is relevant to the decision. Because humans are visual creatures, critical information often comes from what the person sees. Therefore, it is important that people look at the correct things. Several studies have found that one of the things that separates experts from novices is that experts look at the areas that contain critical information more often and for longer than novices. This is often referred to as gaze control. This study examines gaze control in a group of police officers during a stressful scenario.

How Did They Look at It?

The researchers recruited 44 police officers to participate in the study. The scenario was quite complex and included receiving an initial low priority call that was then upgraded to a higher priority call, driving through a course, and then interacting with multiple people at the scene. Four role-players were involved in the scenario. The assailant was the driver of one car involved in the accident. The other driver was an off-duty police officer. The third was a passenger in the assailant’s car, and the fourth was a motorist that stopped to help. Two officers responded to the scenario. During the interaction on scene, the assailant became increasingly agitated and eventually shot at the police officers. The police officers wore vision trackers and heart rate monitors for the entire scenario. The researchers used some complicated statistics to classify the participants into an efficient scan group and an inefficient scan group based upon vision tracking data. Essentially, the efficient scan group looked at fewer things and looked at those things for longer than the inefficient scan group.

What Did They Find?

Eighty-five percent of the participants in the efficient scan group returned fire on the suspect, whereas; only 50% of the inefficient group returned fire. There was not a statistically significant difference in how long it took members of the groups to return fire (when they did return fire). The efficient group had more people with tactical training, military experience, and college degrees than the inefficient group. 

The heart rates of the participants generally increased across the scenario suggesting that it was stressful. The average heartrate when the participants started the scenario was 120. This increased above 140 when they arrived on scene and exited the car, and was around 170 when the suspect shot at the officers. However, there was not a statistically significant difference in heart rates between the efficient and inefficient scan groups. The groups also did not vary significantly in how long it took them to return fire at the assailant.

The two groups did vary substantially in how long they looked at different areas of interest. The figure below shows these differences. You can see that the efficient scan group spent more time looking at the threat (the assailant) and potential threat (the passenger in the assailant’s car) than the inefficient group; whereas the inefficient group spent more time looking at a truck that was placed in the scene as a distraction.

So What?

This study fits well with the existing literature which suggests that what people look at is important to their ability to act effectively. Here participants who spent more time looking at likely threats were more able to react when the person became an actual threat.

There is some suggestion that tactical training or military experience may have improved the gaze performance of the participants. Qualitative interviews with the participants suggested that those in the efficient group were more likely to have training or experience that was relevant to the task such as combat military deployments, swat training, and scenario-based training. It is important to note that years of experience as a police officer was not associated with being in the efficient group!

To me, this study (and several others) shows the importance of educating officer attention. This education does not need to be explicit. Officers don’t necessarily need to be told where to look. They will learn where to look when they are placed in training situations that sufficiently mimic real-world encounters. For example, in the study that we summarized here, people learned to focus on the suspect’s hands by making judgments about whether the person was a threat or not. Educating attention is also critical to forming the perception-action linkages that are needed to perform in real-life environments. Shooting at paper targets on a flat range is not enough to create these linkages and may be part of the explanation as to why police accuracy in actual shootings is so low when their range accuracy is so high (as this study illustrates). To get the maximum value out of training time, as much of it as possible should be designed to expose the trainee to the relevant perception-action linkages.