Contextual cueing during lethal force training: How target design and repetition can alter threat assessments

ABSTRACT

Lethal force training requires individuals to make threat assessments, which involves holistic scenario processing to identify potential threats. Photorealistic targets can make threat/non-threat judgments substantially more genuine and challenging compared to simple cardboard or silhouette targets. Unfortunately, repeated target use also brings unintended consequences that could invalidate threat assessment processes conducted during training. Contextually rich or unique targets could be implicitly memorable in a way that allows observers to recall weapon locations rather than forcing observers to conduct a naturalistic assessment. Experiment 1 demonstrated robust contextual cueing effects in a well-established shoot/don’t-shoot stimulus set, and Experiment 2 extended this finding from complex scene stimuli to simple actor-only stimuli. Experiment 3 demonstrated that these effects also occurred among trained professionals using rifles rather than computer-based tasks. Taken together, these findings demonstrate the potential for uncontrolled target repetition to alter the fundamental processes of threat assessment during lethal force training.

KEYWORDS:

• Contextual cueing
• lethal force
• threat assessment
• attention
• training

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Andrew Warner and Dominick Pistone for assistance with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this article reflect the results of research conducted by the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense, nor the U.S. Government.

Human research/institutional review board

The study protocol was approved by the Naval Medical Research Unit Dayton Institutional Review Board in compliance with all applicable federal regulations governing the protection of human subjects.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Office of Naval Research award to ATB [work unit number: H1719, N0001418WX00247].