Sets of distinctive auditory iconic warnings can be designed to alert and inform pilots about non-time-pressured events. Potential applications of language-neutral icons as informative warnings include civil, commercial, and defense aircraft.

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The study was designed to examine whether the availability of reduced-processing decision support system interfaces could improve the decision making of inexperienced personnel in the context of firefighting. Background: Although research into reducedprocessing decision support systems has demonstrated benefits in minimizing cognitive load, these benefits have not typically translated into direct improvements in decision accuracy because of the tendency for inexperienced personnel to focus on less-critical information. The authors investigated whether reducedprocessing interfaces that direct users' attention toward the most critical cues for decision making can produce improvements in decision-making performance. Method: Novice participants made incident command-related decisions in experimental conditions that differed according to the amount of information that was available within the interface, the level of control that they could exert over the presentation of information, and whether they had received decision training. Results: The results revealed that despite receiving training, participants improved in decision accuracy only when they were provided with an interface that restricted information access to the most critical cues. Conclusion: It was concluded that an interface that restricts information access to only the most critical cues in the scenario can facilitate improvements in decision performance. Application: Decision support system interfaces that encourage the processing of the most critical cues have the potential to improve the accuracy and timeliness of decisions made by inexperienced personnel.

Empirical investigations of cognitive skill acquisition have generally focused on differences between novice and expert operators. The result is a neglect of the intermediate stage of skill acquisition in which operators progress through competence towards expert performance. This study investigated the qualitative and quantitative differences in the cognitive cues generated by competent and expert firefighters. Participants first read a written, firefighting-related decision scenario before listing the cues that they considered relevant in formulating a decision. The results revealed that experts generated significantly more cues than competent operators. Further, the types of cues generated by competent and expert operators differed, with experts reporting significantly more safety-related cues than competent operators. These outcomes suggest that differences exist between the cues that are employed by expert and competent operators during decision-making, and that these differences reflect a qualitative change in information processing that occurs during the transition from competence to expertise.

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