Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2014 in the subject Psychology - Miscellaneous, grade: 24.00, language: English, abstract: During a casual conversation, a law enforcement officer claimed that the type of cues that a novice officer selected determined his/her eventual success in becoming a skilled decision maker. Previous literature in cognition and developmental psychology has suggested a similar phenomenon. Gentner, Holyoak and Kokinov state that analogical reasoning is correlated to cue evaluation in problem solving and in decision making (2001). In order to explore this further, a two part study was employed. In the first part, law enforcement officers and firefighters with more than ten years of experience were interviewed about training, cues and standard operating procedures. Then, these officers assisted in creating the testing materials. In the second part, law enforcement and firefighting officers took the test which consisted of an analogy test and an evaluation of important cues within scenarios. The results of the study suggest that law enforcement officers use analogical reasoning to determine cues within a scenario but firefighters do not. The law enforcement officers who were good at identifying important cues were also good at matching less obvious word meanings. Firefighters who were good at identifying important cues were poor at matching less obvious word meanings. When the decision making procedures from both sets of subject matter experts were reviewed, firefighters stated that a standard operating procedure based on heuristics is used. Law enforcement officers stated that reasoning skill is a strong component of standard operating procedure. The study produced training recommendations for firefighters and law enforcement officers.
About the Author: Lisa Jo Elliott earned a PhD in Engineering Psychology from New Mexico State University. She has worked as a Usability Engineer for IBM, the Department of Defense and at the New Mexico State University Physical Science Laboratory/Unmanned Flight Test Center. Dr. Elliott is the author of several peer reviewed journal articles, her latest article focuses on the effect of expertise on tool design tolerance in social networking sites published in Computers in Human Behavior (2014). She has book chapters on the effects of automation on design and is a speaker at local and regional conferences. Dr. Elliott has served as an assistant professor of Human Factors at the former University of South Florida Polytechnic. She is currently the Director of Human Factors and Usability Testing at Missouri Western State University in St. Joseph, Missouri, USA.