Gaze Control and Tactical Decision-Making Under Stress in Active-Duty Police Officers During a Live Use-of-Force Response

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2024

Journal / Book Title

Journal of Motor Behavior

Abstract

Police officers during dynamic and stressful encounters are required to make rapid decisions that rely on effective decision-making, experience, and intuition. Tactical decision-making is influenced by the officer’s capability to recognize critical visual information and estimation of threat. The purpose of the current study is to investigate how visual search patterns using cluster analysis and factors that differentiate expertise (e.g., years of service, tactical training, related experiences) influence tactical decision-making in active-duty police officers (44 active-duty police officers) during high stress, high threat, realistic use of force scenario following a car accident and to examine the relationships between visual search patterns and physiological response (heart rate). A cluster analysis of visual search variables (fixation duration, fixation location difference score, and number of fixations) produced an Efficient Scan and an Inefficient Scan group. Specifically, the Efficient Scan group demonstrated longer total fixation duration and differences in area of interests (AOI) fixation duration compared to the Inefficient Scan group. Despite both groups exhibiting a rise in physiological stress response (HR) throughout the high-stress scenario, the Efficient Scan group had a history of tactical training, improved return fire performance, had higher sleep time total, and demonstrated increased processing efficiency and effective attentional control, due to having a background of increased tactical training.

DOI

10.1080/00222895.2023.2229946

Journal ISSN / Book ISBN

85163572073 (Scopus)

Rights

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Published Citation

Murray, N. P., Lewinski, W., Sandri Heidner, G., Lawton, J., & Horn, R. (2023). 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

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