Decision Making in Dynamic Environments: Fixation Errors and Their Causes

One of the goals of naturalistic studies of human decision making is to reveal the cognitive loads or task difficulties imposed on the decision maker in real work environments. Fixation errors or cognitive lockups have been reported as a unique type of performance failure in dynamic work environments, and are thus particularly valuable to the understanding of the challenges and difficulties confronting practitioners in dynamic environments. In this paper, we present the analysis of fixation errors during real-life trauma patient resuscitation. The analysis elicits two factors, both rooted in the inherent complexity of the domain, that contributed to the occurrence of fixation errors: unreliable monitoring devices and delayed feedback. The former induces the behavior of preferring confirmatory information, partly for redundancy checks. The latter may create a false sense of system stability and divert attention away from the correct diagnosis.