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Objective: Nurses engaged in practice make split-second decisions based on stimuli perceived in the clinical environment. There has been limited research in nursing on stimuli perception and limited research aimed specifically at directly measuring nurses’ gaze and the subsequent quality of their decisions.Methods: This study used an observational descriptive design to examine nurses’ gaze behaviors as they cared for a simulated patient in three different clinical scenarios. Participants were fitted with eye-tracking goggles that facilitated the recording on video of the focal point of their gaze. The recorded videos were coded to quantify the participants’ areas of focus. For each scenario, visual focus data were compared between participants who successfully resolved the scenarios and those who did not. Results: The results revealed statistically significant differences in areas of focus between successful and unsuccessful participants. While successful participants focused on the patient, unsuccessful participants focused on task-irrelevant environmental cues.Conclusions: The results demonstrate a need for nurse educators to focus their students on the patient, while guiding them to avoid becoming mired in task irrelevant foci and actions.

Objectives\ud Whereas accounts of skilled performance based on automaticity (Beilock & Carr, 2001; Fitts & Posner, 1967) emphasize reduced cognitive involvement in advanced skill, other accounts propose that skilled performance relies on increased cognitive control (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995). The objective of this study was to test predictions differentiating the automaticity and cognitive control accounts by assessing thinking during golf putting.\ud \ud Design\ud The cognitive processes of less-skilled and more-skilled golfers were examined during putting using concurrent, think-aloud verbal reports. The design included putting conditions that differed in complexity and thus the need to adapt the putt to the particular conditions.\ud \ud Method\ud Putting complexity was manipulated via changes to putt length and perceived stress during putting. Putts were executed from two starting locations (i.e., the same starting location as the previous putt or a new starting location).\ud \ud Results\ud The analysis showed that, during putting: more thoughts were verbalized overall by more-skilled golfers than less-skilled golfers; both groups verbalized more thoughts overall during higher-complexity putts (i.e., longer distance putts, and putts under higher stress when executed from a new starting location) than lower-complexity putts; and the two groups did not differ significantly in the number of thoughts related to motor mechanics.\ud \ud Conclusions\ud The results of this study provide support for a cognitive control account of skilled performance and suggest that the path to skilled performance involves the acquisition of more refined higher-level cognitive representations mediating planning and analysis.\ud \ud Keywords\ud Cognitive control; Concurrent verbalizations; Conscious control; Expert performance; Think-aloud; Verbal reports

Objectives To examine the use of relaxation skills by differentially skilled athletes in relation to the deliberate practice framework. Design Differentially skilled athletes completed a survey about their use of relaxation skills. Method 150 athletes representing three skill levels (recreational, college, and professional) completed the deliberate relaxation for sport survey, which assessed relaxation on three deliberate practice dimensions (relevancy, concentration, and enjoyment); time spent in different relaxation skills in a recent typical week; and functions of relaxation. Results Athletes perceived relaxation as relevant to performance, requiring concentration, and enjoyable, and the relationships between these dimensions were positive. Professional and college athletes perceived relaxation as more relevant to effective competition than recreational athletes. Professional athletes engaged in more relaxation in a typical week than college and recreational athletes. In a typical week, autogenic, eastern, and muscle relaxation types were used least, deep breathing, meditation, and imagery relaxation types moderately, and stretching most. Athletes reported the primary functions of relaxation were to cope with competitive anxiety and promote recovery but relaxation was also reported to be used to cope with “everyday” anxieties associated with being an athlete. More physical (e.g., muscle relaxation) than mental relaxation types were used in relation to coping with competitive anxiety, whereas more mental (e.g., meditation) than physical relaxation types were used in relation to coping with everyday anxiety. Conclusions The study provides support for the sport-specific framework of deliberate practice in relation to use of relaxation skills and informs the current understanding of self-regulation by athletes.

Research on decision-making under stress has mainly involved laboratory-based studies with few contextual descriptions of decision-making under stress in the natural ecology. We examined how police officers prepared for, coped with and made decisions under threat-of-death stress during real events. A delayed retrospective report method was used to elicit skilled police officers' thoughts and feelings during attempts to resolve such events. Reports were analysed to identify experiences of stress and coping, and thought processes underpinning decision-making during the event. Officers experienced a wide range of events, coped with stress predominantly via problem-focused strategies, and adapted their decision-making under stress based on the available context. Future officer training should involve a greater variety of training scenarios than is involved in current training, and expose trainees to the possible variants of each situation to foster better situational representation and, thus, a more reliable and adaptive mental model for use in decision-making. Practitioner Summary: This study concerns decision-making and coping strategies used by skilled police officers during real threat-of-death situations. Officers' decision-making strategies differed according to the complexity of the situation and they coped with the stress of these situations via attempts to resolve the situations (e.g. by planning responses) and, to a lesser extent, via attempts to deal with their emotions.

This study investigated novices' “lived experiences” of navigation within the sport of orienteering from an enactive and phenomenological approach. The objective was to qualitatively characterize elements of task-related situations that were meaningful for orienteers. The results showed that the participants continuously made judgments about the reliability of their estimations about whether they were on “the right route” on the course. When the participants judged that they were only approximately on the right route or were unable to locate themselves, elements of the situation other than map and terrain features became meaningful for them. These results demonstrate that, for novice orienteers, navigation activity must extend beyond navigation as a logical, computational way-finding problem to include embodied, social, cultural and situated dimensions.

A better understanding of the factors influencing medical team performance and accounting for expert medical team performance should benefit medical practice. Therefore, the aim here is to highlight key issues with using deliberate practice to improve medical team performance, especially given the success of deliberate practice for developing individual expert performance in medicine and other domains. Highlighting these issues will inform the development of training for medical teams. The authors first describe team coordination and its critical role in medical teams. Presented next are the cognitive mechanisms that allow expert performers to accurately interpret the current situation via the creation of an accurate mental "model" of the current situation, known as a situation model. Following this, the authors propose that effective team performance depends at least in part on team members having similar models of the situation, known as a shared situation model. The authors then propose guiding principles for implementing team deliberate practice in medicine and describe how team deliberate practice can be used in an attempt to reduce barriers inherent in medical teams to the development of shared situation models. The paper concludes with considerations of limitations, and future research directions, concerning the implementation of team deliberate practice within medicine.

This study describes appraisal and coping patterns of Portuguese trapshooters during competition, via post-performance retrospective verbal reports. Probabilities that an event (e.g., missed target) is followed by another event (e.g., negative appraisal) were calculated and state transitional diagrams were drawn. Event-sequences during critical and non-critical performance periods were compared. Negative appraisals were most likely before and after missed targets and hits with the second shot. Positive appraisals were most likely before problem-focused coping and after emotion-focused coping. These findings support the process view of coping by illustrating that athletes cope with a variety of situations via a complex set of appraisals.

This article is concerned with enhancing agent coordination in modern sociotechnological systems. To this end, sociotechnological systems are conceptualized as problem solving systems that comprise human and technological agents engaged in dynamic collaboration. Following this, there is a discussion of the challenge of achieving agent coordination in problem solving systems as technological agents become increasingly autonomous. A key assertion is that agent coordination in problem solving systems might be enhanced through the study of competent coordination in living systems such as human and animal groups. Based on a review of research on competent coordination in human and animal groups, design principles for problem solving systems are then presented. Finally, methods are proposed for measuring the extent to which a given agent operates in accordance with these principles.

While previous research indicates wide wealth dispersion at retirement within households with similar lifetime incomes, there have been few attempts to identify personal financial behaviors associated with retirement wealth in households matched for lifetime income. Householders with similar demographics and lifetime income but differing markedly in net worth near retirement were surveyed in terms of personal financial behaviors undertaken during their lifetime. Results revealed key differences between householders with low and high retirement wealth in their financial behaviors and how these were acquired.

International audience; This article reports on a highly elite orienteer’s cognitive activity over the course of two international competitions. We characterise the orienteer’s concerns in relation to the problems raised during the competitions. The participant wore a head-mounted video camera throughout performance to enable the capture of an events record from the participant’s perspective. During a post-performance self-confrontation interview, the participant was played the video and asked to describe his activity in relation to the events observed. The interview data were then used to identify the orienteer’s concerns at each point in time during the races. These “local” concerns were then compared and subsequently classified to characterise the typical concerns of the participant. Results showed three typical concerns: (a) find the controls faster than the opponents; (b) optimise running pace throughout the race; and (c) reflect on actions undertaken during performance. Results suggest the performer used a range of knowledge-driven strategies that enhanced the efficiency of task performance, and flexibly switched between strategies and decision-options in the face of presented changes in the task status. He also engaged in various reflective processes concurrent with performance that augmented the use of these strategies. In conclusion, this study provides insight into the cognitive processes underlying expert performance in sports characterised by decision-making under complexity, uncertainty, and time pressure.

Objective: The aim of this study was to demonstrate how research on emotion in sport psychology might inform the field of human factors. Background: Human factors historically has paid little attention to the role of emotion within the research on human-system relations. The theories, methods, and practices related to research on emotion within sport psychology might be informative for human factors because fundamentally, sport psychology and human factors are applied fields concerned with enhancing performance in complex, real-world domains. Method: Reviews of three areas of theory and research on emotion in sport psychology are presented, and the relevancy of each area for human factors is proposed: (a) emotional preparation and regulation for performance, (b) an emotional trait explanation for risk taking in sport, and (c) the link between emotion and motor behavior. Finally, there are suggestions for how to continue cross-talk between human factors and sport psychology about research on emotion and related topics in the future. Results: The relevance of theory and research on emotion in sport psychology for human factors is demonstrated. Conclusion: The human factors field and, in particular, research on human-system relations may benefit from a consideration of theory and research on emotion in sport psychology. Application: Theories, methods, and practices from sport psychology might be applied usefully to human factors.