HPAE – Assessing Submariners’ Intuitive Decision-making Skills using Neurocognitive Methods
(Room S320A)
29 Nov 17
2:00 PM
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2:30 PM
Military missions pose complex cognitive and perceptual challenges, such as detecting potential improvised explosive devices along the roadside, or detecting anomalous social cues in a crowded market that may suggest an impending attack. Situations such as these do not allow time for extensive deliberation; rather, the ability to make quick and accurate decisions is key to survival. Evans and Stanovich (2013) suggest that, unlike deliberate decision-making, this type of intuitive decision-making is extremely fast and requires little or no working memory. Research has shed light on the neural mechanisms underlying intuitive decision-making. For example, Luu and colleagues (2010) used electroencephalography (EEG)-based techniques to identify a neural signal of intuition during an object detection task. In their study, participants viewed fragmented line drawings and indicated whether each image contained a real object. Participants’ event-related potentials (ERPs) differed between correctly identified real objects and correctly rejected non-objects after ~200 milliseconds (ms) and this difference persisted through ~500 ms. The purpose of the current study was to examine the generalizability of this neural signal with a military sample performing both everyday decision tasks (object detection) and military-relevant tasks (course safety decisions). Twenty-seven submariners participated in a rigorously-controlled, within-subjects experiment. Statistical analyses of the participants’ brain activity confirmed that the neural signal identified by Luu and colleagues generalizes across tasks. Moreover, this signal reliably differentiates expert submariners from novices. This study is unique in that it validated the existence of a neural indicator of accurate intuitive decision-making across both samples and tasks.