Abstract
This study set out to identify the basis of decision making expertise by the operational incident commander in an industrial emergency response organisation, involving domain-specific problem solving strategies and skills, and knowledge developed through normal operations and training. Perspectives from NDM, and the specialised working memory component view in cognitive psychology were integrated as Engineers (n = 16) from a high risk industrial environment participated in a dual-task paradigm involving a context-specific computer-based decision task combined with a secondary visuo-spatial distractor task. Response times, quality, and difficulty of decisions, categorised as typical/atypical and procedure/no procedure, were examined across duration of experience (high experience/low experience). Results provide evidence of fast, high quality, low difficulty schema-based decision making. However being covered by a procedure did not assist fast recall from LTM. Targeted experiential training to develop schemas in LTM is emphasised.
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