Abstract
Since the first naturalistic decision making (NDM) conference in 1989, the NDM community of practice has grown worldwide. NDM methods and models have extended well beyond the early studies of fire ground commanders to a broad range of domains. In fact, NDM professionals are often invited to contribute to the study of emerging problems with significant implications for safety, productivity, and innovation, and NDM methods and perspectives have advanced our understanding of decision making across many disciplines.
This special issue highlights the integration of NDM into multidisciplinary efforts to improve work in complex domains. It also presents examples in which NDM research has had a meaningful impact on our understanding of complex cognitive work and has offered solutions to challenging problems.
In response to the call for papers for this special issue, we received many submissions from all over the world describing new theoretical constructs, training methods, and research in domains such as health care, accident and incident investigation, aviation, military, and sports. This wealth of contributions is evidence of the expansion and broad reach of NDM frameworks and applications.
The seven articles in this first part of the special issue volume span the range of topics and domains we envisioned. We solicited integrative articles highlighting links between NDM and other research communities. Patterson, Militello, Su, and Sarkar discuss loss of system resilience as a potential unintended consequence of the introduction of new technology in the health care domain, as it may result in an increase in cognitive work for macrocognition functions. In other work in the health care domain, D. Klein, Woods, Klein, and Perry examine decisions on patient safety using the evidence-based medicine framework and identify potential disconnects and ways to strengthen best-practices strategies. Canellas and Feigh tackle the complexities inherent in representing NDM computationally. Using a general mathematical form that represents the components of fast and frugal heuristics (FFH; Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996), they demonstrate that similar facets of NDM theories can be modeled by transforming them “through the lens of the FFH components” and describe how different inputs to the model can approximate different levels of expertise and time pressure.
Articles in this issue also highlight outcomes and applications of NDM research. G. Klein and Borders present an application of the ShadowBox method for scenario-based training of war-fighters’ social, perceptual, and cognitive skills to manage civilian encounters. NDM has also advanced research and analysis in incident and accident investigation. According to Strauch, changes in the focus of National Transportation Safety Board accident reports have been prompted and enabled by advances in NDM theory—specifically with respect to a focus on the decision processes of operators.
Finally, this part of the special issue illustrates new applications of the critical decision method (CDM), a core cognitive task analysis technique used across a range of NDM research domains. Boulton and Cole use the CDM to examine and compare the tactical decision-making processes of expert and novice Authorized Firearms Officers during armed confrontations. Cattermole-Terzic, Horberry, and Hassall use CDM interviews to pinpoint key decision points and interagency coordination issues among traffic incident–responding agencies and suggested countermeasures using decision-centered design.
Together, the collection of papers here provides an in-depth look at the extension of NDM theory and methods across disciplines and domains.
The second part will appear in the December 2016 issue of JCEDM. We invite you to enjoy the read!