Quiet eye system helps train police, YouTube video

[Tyler Durden]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWiGflJNFWk

[tombogan03884]

Not sure if this is a valid training aid, or trying to use gadgets to replace practice.

[Tyler Durden]

sorry I don't have a link, but the Cliff's Notes version is that they did study of basically SWAT team guys shooting a suspected bad guy.  Then they compared the SWAT team guys's results/data versus some novice or rookie police officers's results:

Part one of a two-part series
By Force Science Research Center

A major new study by the Force Science Research Center for the first time has identified exactly how the “gaze patterns” of officers who are likely to win gunfights differ from those who are likely to lose them.

Winners, it is revealed, tend to anticipate an emerging threat sooner, shoot to stop it faster and more accurately, and make fewer errors in judgment because of the unique way in which they watch a potential attacker’s body as a deadly confrontation unfolds.

A key finding: Those who win lethal assaults do so, in part, because they achieve target acquisition with their firearm in a way that is directly opposite of how most officers are trained.

“This unique study shows that winning a gunfight involves more than just issues of action and reaction times,” FSRC’s executive director Dr. Bill Lewinski told Force Science News. “Where an officer is looking during an encounter, what kind of information he is picking up, and how he is processing it are also vitally important. An effective gaze control strategy can help officers minimize or defeat the action/reaction advantage that the suspect might otherwise have.

“In short, an officer’s performance can be impaired or enhanced by where his eyes and attention are focused in the midst of a deadly encounter.”

What the new study discovered about that phenomenon, Lewinski says, could have significant repercussions on law enforcement firearms training.

The study was conducted by Lewinski and Dr. Joan Vickers of Canada’s University of Calgary, a renowned researcher of the relationship between eye movement and athletic performance. They recently presented the first detailed report of their findings at the prestigious International Conference on Spatial Cognition in Rome.

Their full paper, “Gaze Control and Shooting Performance of Elite and Rookie Police Officers During a Force-on-Force Encounter,” will be posted on the Force Science website once it has been published in an academic journal. Meanwhile, FSN’s two-part series is the first disclosure to the international law enforcement community about the study’s surprising practical discoveries.

FORCE-ON-FORCE SET-UP
Field work for the research was conducted a year ago in the United Kingdom with the help of 24 police volunteers. Eleven were highly experienced, male veterans of an Emergency Response Team (ERT), seasoned in fighting terrorists among other assignments, with a median age of nearly 39. The rest were younger rookies (median age just over 30), seven of them female, who had completed their pre-service firearms and simulation training and were considered “ready for the street.” Both groups predominately were right-eye shooters.

The research scenario, designed by Lewinski, was based on an actual incident. One at a time the volunteers were armed with a holstered Glock pistol fitted to fire a single Simunition cartridge and told they were on duty to “provide security” at an embassy office where intelligence had indicated an armed encounter would occur that day.

About 20 feet in front of the officer being tested was a receptionist at a desk. Presently an adult male, playing the role of a civilian tourist, entered the room and engaged the receptionist in conversation regarding a problem with his passport, keeping his back to the subject officer.

Initially the exchange was polite but as the receptionist proved not to be helpful the man became increasingly agitated. About three seconds before the end of the one-minute scenario, his voice started to rise and he began cursing and slapping the table. Suddenly, in an explosion of rage, he yanked an object from under his coat and pivoted quickly.

In most instances, the object was a handgun and he fired at the officer. But randomly he spun around only with a cell phone. The volunteers were not advised in advance of this “catch” switch. They were told only that they should “handle the threat” appropriately, using their handgun.

“The suspect’s dynamic turning and shooting unfolded very rapidly,” Lewinski says, “and presented quite a challenge for any officer. We wanted to detect the clearest demonstration of operational differences, and that’s why groups of the best and the least experienced officers were chosen.”

Each volunteer went through the scenario seven times. According to the researchers, no significant change was noticed in their reactions with repetition.

SOPHISTICATED MONITORING
During the scenario, each officer wore a light-weight, head-mounted apparatus with two sophisticated and highly sensitive computer-interactive components: 1) a small video camera that filmed the scene being played out in front of the officer from the officer’s perspective, and 2) a mobile monocular “eye tracker” that used reflection off of the officer’s cornea to precisely document his line of sight.

Just where the officer’s gaze was directed at any given split-second was overlaid on the digital image the camera was recording, in the form of a small red circle. In other words, exactly where the officer was looking, when he was looking there, in what sequence, and for how long were all captured in a continuous, time-coded format that allowed every location of his gaze to be noted and analyzed later.

A separate video camera was placed in the room to photograph each officer frontally from head to toe as he experienced and reacted to the role-playing. These images were later synced with those from the headgear. (The data collection system, developed by Vickers, is called the vision-in-action method. Samples of the recordings will be posted on the Force Science website when the academic paper is posted. For more information, see Vickers’ book, Perception, Cognition and Decision Training: The Quiet Eye in Action.)

Keeping the scenario consistent across all officers, of course, was critical for comparison purposes. So the receptionist (played by FSRC executive Patricia Thiem) and the suspect (played by Lt. Lee Edwards of the Minneapolis PD) worked extensively with an acting coach, who trained them to maintain the same timing and mannerisms across repeated performances.

The field recordings took two full weeks to complete; the subsequent analysis took months. Here are the most significant findings:

SHOOTING PERFORMANCE
The ERT officers — considered the elite shooters in the study — strongly out-performed the rookies.


• First of all, the ERT spent significantly less time assessing the situation before drawing their gun. On whole, they drew “well before the assailant began his pivot,” Vickers reports. Most drew early and “held [their gun] at chest level before aiming.” The rookies tended to delay drawing until about a second after his turn.


• The ERT shot before the assailant got his round off 92.5 percent of the time, beating him by an average of nearly 180 milliseconds (ms). The rookies shot first only about 42 percent of the time and on average lagged behind the attacker by more than 13 ms. Responding “very poorly,” the study says, the rookies essentially “reacted to his attack, rather than being ahead of him as were the ERT during every phase of the encounter.”


• ERT hit the assailant nearly 75 percent of the time, compared to about 54 percent — ”slightly more than chance” — for the recently trained rookies. ERT hits were in the upper torso (center mass) 62 percent of the time, versus about 48 percent for the rookies.
• In more than 60 percent of their trials, rookies fired when the assailant brandished a cell phone instead of a gun, compared to only about 18 percent for the ERT.


GAZE PATTERNS
Anyone would expect highly experienced elites to shoot better than rank novices, but what’s impressive is the relationship that gaze and focus appeared to have to performance.

As part of their meticulous analysis of where the test subjects were looking during the last critical seven seconds of the scenario, the researchers tabulated two important factors: fixations (when an officer’s gaze was stable on an object or location within a three-degree visual angle for 100 ms or longer) and saccades (when the eyes moved rapidly from one fixed location to another for at least 66.66 ms).

Among their discoveries, these are considered most meaningful:
• The ERT officers tended to use fixations of only short duration early in the encounter, during their initial assessment and as the suspect began to pivot toward them. Then they used longer-duration fixations as they aimed and fired. “They needed less time to ‘read’ critical cues” and acquire external feedback information that “allowed them to prepare their shooting movements in advance and prevail over the assailant,” the researchers explain. Thus the ERT “were ahead of the assailant in terms of their motor phases and gaze control across all phases of the encounter.”
• “The rookies used an opposite strategy and had long-duration fixations at the outset and shorter durations as they aimed and fired.” In effect, “the rookies were behind” the suspect’s actions and were “caught by surprise.” They “used a reactive strategy where they acquired information at the last moment, which was inadequate both in terms of its content and timing for the extreme demands of the encounter.”
• “The ERT had a higher frequency of fixations than the rookies in all phases [of the scenario] except the aim/fire phase, when the ERT had fewer fixations to fewer locations than the rookies, indicative of greater focus and concentration as they aimed and fired.”
• The ERT increasingly directed their attention to the suspect’s gun hand/arm as the scenario evolved. “They increased the percent of fixations to this location from 21 percent in the assessment and early pivot phases to 71 percent during the final two seconds. On hits, the ERT directed 86 percent of their final fixations to this one location, revealing a remarkable degree of focus and concentration under fire.” And, the study explains, they had time for a final, undisturbed period of super-concentration that Vicker’s calls “the quiet eye,” which has been linked with high performance across many different genres of athletics. In this, their eye remained settled on a defined target location through trigger pull.
• “The rookies did not show the same funneling of their attention to the assailant’s gun hand/arm,” the study points out. Early on, similar to the ERT, they concentrated a minority of their fixations there. But at the time the suspect aimed and fired, only 33 percent of the rookies’ fixations were directed there, a modest and inadequate increase. And whatever quiet-eye time they exhibited was significantly lower.

TELL-TALE SACCADE
Perhaps most startling, the officers’ last abrupt shift of gaze before firing was found to be radically different between the two groups.

The rookie’s final saccade, especially among those who missed when they fired, “occurred at the same time they tried to fixate the target and aim,” the study reveals. At that critical moment in the last 500 ms, the rookies in a staggering 82 percent of their tests took their eyes off the assailant and attempted to look at their own gun, trying to find or confirm sight alignment as they aimed. “This pulled them out of the gunfight for what turned out to be a significant period of time,” Lewinski says. Vickers adds: “On a high percentage of their shots, the rookies did not see the assailant as they fired,” contributing to inaccurate shooting and the misjudgment of the cell phone as a threat.

About 30 percent of the ERT also looked at their gun, but their timing was different. Most of those gaze-shifts occurred before the officers aimed, “followed by the onset of their aim and fixation on the target and firing.”

FLAWED TRAINING?
The researchers pose the possibility that the rookies’ training may have contributed to their poor performance. They were taught pistolcraft “similar to how most police officers first learn to shoot a handgun: to focus first on the rear sight, then on the front sight, and finally on the target, aligning all three before pulling the trigger.”

“This is a very time-consuming process and one that was not successful in this study,” Vickers says.

Somewhere across their training, practice, and experience, the successful ERT officers had learned what essentially is a reverse process: Their immediate and predominate focus is on the weapon carried by their attacker. With their gaze concentrated there, they bring their gun up to their line of sight and catch their sights only in their peripheral vision, a subtle “sight glimpse,” as Lewinski terms it. “They have an unconscious kinesthetic sense to know that their gun is up and positioned properly,” he says. “This is a focus strategy that Olympic shooters use,” says Vickers, “and it is simpler, faster, and more effective.”

As the assailant’s actual attack got underway, the elite officers were zeroed in on a “weapons focus.” That is, the ERT officers’ “fixations were not directed to the assailant’s centre of mass as he pivoted and fired, but to the weapon itself, which he held away from his body until the moment he fired. The ERT tracked the weapon as soon as it was visible, using a series of fixations. Because he was moving rapidly, it was only during the last few milliseconds that his centre mass presented a viable target.”

“This intense attentiveness to the weapon can have memory implications later on,” Lewinski explains. “Now we have an empirical study showing why an officer who survives a gunfight may be unable to identify a perpetrator’s face or recall other important details proximate to the shooting, such as the body position or turning action of the subject.”

Now that the study has documented important ways in which expert shooters behave, how can trainers best convey these elite skills to other officers? “FSRC plans to do more work with Dr. Vickers to identify answers to that question,” Lewinski says. “But already, these findings suggest some important changes that will point us in the right direction.”

I. “Point shooting” clarification…Plus: What new gaze pattern findings mean for your training

Part 2 of a 2-part series

Editor’s Note: In Transmission #134 [10/9/09], Part 1 of this series reported significant new findings from the Force Science Research Center about how an officer’s “gaze pattern” in evaluating a potential assailant affects his or her ability to win a gunfight. The research reveals that “elite,” highly experienced officers are better able to quickly and accurately read visual threat cues, focus sooner and longer on where a possible attacker will present a weapon, and draw and fire faster to defeat an assault, compared to less experienced and less successful officers. Part 2 addresses the training implications of this research..

First, a clarification….

Some readers concluded from Part 1 that the Force Science Research Center “endorses” so-called point shooting, where a handgun’s muzzle is positioned toward the target and the gun is fired without significant reference to the sights.

That assumption apparently was drawn from one of the important discoveries of the gaze-pattern study, which was conducted in the United Kingdom by Dr. Bill Lewinski, FSRC’s executive director, and Dr. Joan Vickers, a visual tracking expert at the University of Calgary in Canada.

The researchers found that just before firing in an armed confrontation rookies tended to look away from their target and search for their sights for reassurance of their aim, thereby, in Lewinski’s words, “pulling themselves out of the gunfight at a critical moment and negatively affecting their accuracy, their speed of response, and their awareness of what the suspect was doing.”

Most of the highly experienced officers in the study, in contrast, concentrated their visual focus on the target/suspect, catching only a fast glimpse of their sights in their peripheral vision and relying primarily on “an unconscious kinesthetic sense to know that their gun is up and positioned properly.”

“This should not be interpreted as sanctioning or promoting any training method in shooting, especially under life-threatening high stress, becomes problematic, and in this which the sights are ignored,” Lewinski emphasizes. “It’s true that point shooting can be effective at short distances and probably is instinctively used by many officers in responding to close encounters. But at greater distances, the accuracy of just pointing and study officers were responding to a lethal threat that was 15-20 feet away.

“The rookies had successfully completed firearms training that emphasized traditional sight alignment, but they had no actual street experience. The elite officers began their careers with that same training. But at the time of the study, they were members of a specialized SWAT cadre with years of hard-core street experience. They train constantly and consistently win international competitions.

“Through innumerable repetitions they have developed a highly accurate feel—a strong kinesthetic sense—for raising their gun to a proper alignment without consciously thinking about it or making a pronounced visual or attentional shift to it. If you ran a laser beam from their eye to the target, it would shine right through their sights.“Careful sight alignment was an important step in starting them toward that point of excellence. Experience and intensive training are ultimately what brought them there. Over a long time, they were able to transition from one emphasis to another. Yet even at their exceptional performance level, referencing the sights in some manner, however fleetingly or peripherally, was still part of their response in the type of rapidly unfolding encounter designed for this study.”

As to the training implications of the gaze-pattern study….

More specifics may be known in 1 to 2 years when a new study soon to be launched in England is completed. That research, Lewinski says, will attempt to identify scientifically which teaching methods are most effective for addressing individual student needs and aptitudes so that trainees can more quickly and confidently acquire elite-level use-of-force skills, including firearms performance.

“That study will explore how to fit teaching styles to the individual learning styles of trainees, how much and what kind of training most rapidly and lastingly influences behavior, how to maximize benefits in restricted teaching time, and so on,” Lewinski says. “We will then be able to set standards based on the science of human performance, rather than on tradition, trainer suppositions and preferences, and lawmakers’ dictates, which will be a major breakthrough.”

Meanwhile, Lewinski says, there are important lessons to be drawn immediately from the gaze study so far as instructors, investigators, and individual officers are concerned.

For trainers. For those departments that have not yet joined the 21st century, the message is clearer than ever: It is time to move beyond conventional “qualification” firearms training.

“We are not teaching officers to shoot accurately at the speed of a gunfight before they graduate from academy training,” Lewinski declares. Much more instruction and practice is needed to prepare them to deal with rapidly unfolding, dynamic, high-threat encounters.”

In the recent study, he explains, “the elite officers were able to read danger cues early on and anticipate the suspect’s actions ahead of time so they could stay ahead of the fight. They knew where a gun was likely to appear and were focused there before it did. So they were able to get protective rounds off sooner than the suspect and sooner than the rookies.

“That anticipatory skill can only be developed through experience. At the training level, that means extensive experience with dynamic force-on-force encounters and realistic simulations in which you learn by ‘being there’ over and over again in a wide variety of encounters what to expect and how to look for and recognize danger cues.”

At the same time, repetitive exposure to weapon manipulation at gunfight speed is critical. “There needs to be a much better level of pure shooting skill developed than most departments teach at this point,” Lewinski says. “A gun is a tool, and officers need to be so practiced with it that the mechanics of using it become automatic and unconscious. That frees up more time and attention for decision-making and for concentration on the adversary’s behavior.”

In the study, for instance, the superior mechanical skill and anticipation of danger exhibited by the elite officers allowed them to expend more time and stronger concentration on the suspect’s shooting hand when he spun toward them in the encounter. As a result, they scored significantly better at correctly identifying a cell phone vs. a gun in his hand and tailoring their responses accordingly than did the novice officers.

Training to a gunfight level may well require more time and money than is currently allotted, Lewinski concedes. But departments should ask themselves a tough question, he says: “What level of liability are you willing to accept with your training?” And they must acknowledge that “meeting some current state qualification standard does not in itself mean that officers are going to be successful on the street and make great decisions and deliver great performance when the chips are down and lives are on the line. Any department owes nothing less than the best training for its officers.”

For investigators. The sophisticated eye-tracking device used in the study revealed an important finding for investigators. As the testing scenario unfolded, the visual field of expert shooters and rookies alike narrowed significantly. At the moment of firing, the elites tended to have full concentration on the suspect’s weapon. Many of the novices, because they were searching for their sights, did not even see the suspect himself when they pulled the trigger.

“What is not given attention cannot be remembered,” Lewinski says, “and investigators need to stay conscious of this. There may be much about the gunfight environment, including details about the suspect’s behavior, that an involved officer simply cannot remember because it didn’t register on his narrowly focused brain. And that should not be equated with his being evasive or deceptive.

“The more an investigator pushes an officer to elicit facts that the officer doesn’t know, the more likely the officer will ‘guesstimate’ in an effort to satisfy the questioner and the higher the probability of error and inconsistency.

“Investigators should probe with their questioning only to the extent that officers are comfortable in responding. Their being unable to remember everything should not diminish their credibility in any way.”

For officers. “So far as line officers are concerned, the study presents a challenge of personal commitment,” Lewinski says. “What the study proves is pretty straightforward: Your success in an armed confrontation is likely to be determined by your training and experience.

“Is the training provided by your department sufficient to convince you that you can perform accurately at the speed of a gunfight when your life depends on it?

“If not, what are you doing on your own to bridge that gap?”

[Solus]

I am not sure if it is a training aid or an observation device to see what the officer is doing.

I gathered they found that experienced officers focused on the suspect and not their own firearm to determine if the threat was present.

Then they found that experienced shooters scored hits more often with this practice...which is independent of the device.

It is more like watching the game film in football to see what you did good or bad...and training to do the good...focus on the suspect.

I might be totally wrong, but that is what I got from what I watched.  It sure does seem to go against focusing on your front sight..which might work great hitting a target, but lousy for spotting a threat.

[tombogan03884]

It would seem to be evidence of the need for frequent realistic training.
Interesting article.

[Sponsor]

[Tyler Durden]

at across the room distances, I am thinking you don't even need a front sight.

anywhooo...what I took away from reading the article on the study was that the researchers in my opinion did not sufficiently account far any gender based differences.

IIRC, all the SWAT team members were men.  about half the shooters in the novice group were women.

it has been proven time and time again that women and men view the world differently, and  in general men are more...ahem...visually oriented.

 

[tombogan03884]

at across the room distances, I am thinking you don't even need a front sight.

anywhooo...what I took away from reading the article on the study was that the researchers in my opinion did not sufficiently account far any gender based differences.

IIRC, all the SWAT team members were men.  about half the shooters in the novice group were women.

it has been proven time and time again that women and men view the world differently, and  in general men are more...ahem...visually oriented.

 

Obviously.
Women want "relationships" flowers etc.
Men want boobs.   

[Solus]

Perhaps there was a study related to the difference in perception of men and women.....

Back in the late 80's, Annapolis did a study of the "spatial relations" ability of a group of men and women....spatial relations being necessary skill in engineering.  

The group of men in the study scored something like 20% higher than the woman.  

They were then split into 4 groups.  One group of men and one group of women who played video games for a couple of hours, and one group of men and one group of women who did whatever they wanted except play video games.

Then they got them back together and took the test again.

Both groups of men scored the same as before.  The group of women who did not play video games scored the same...below the men.
But the group of women who did play video games scored equal to the men who took the tests.