OODA, Information Processing, and Mental Strength – Part 2

Welcome back!

In last weeks post we began our in-depth look at OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide and Act) by looking at Observe.  We looked at all the factors that go into this first step and how the Observe step is a simple as seeing or looking at the situation.

Today I’d like to continue with the Observe stage.

Preattentively

People unconsciously accumulate information from the environment.  All available information is pre-attentively processed. Then, the brain filters and processes what is important. Information that has the highest salience (a stimulus that stands out the most) or relevance to what a person is thinking about is selected for further and more complete analysis by conscious (attentive) processing. Understanding how pre-attentive processing works is useful for the tactical athlete and I’ll hold off on that subject for another time.

For a trained tactical athlete the preattentive processes are specifically tuned to seek stimuli such as guns, victim in a pool of blood, etc. as this issue directly relates to survival and sustenance of the individual.

To help the individual aversive stimuli has the power to take partial to total control of perceptual processing mechanism (a.k.a., sensory tunneling). This may result in a decrease of other cognitive and motor activities, i.e. driving, speech, etc.

Research has shown that the sensory tunneling reduces the range of cue utilization, i.e. diminished peripheral vision or change in sensation thresholds and resolution of sensory systems, and may even reprioritize the activities that need to be carried out.

The latter is best captured by the adage “a dog in a hunt doesn’t stop to scratch its fleas.”

The sensory tunneling, during highly aroused states, occurs for the most part good of the individual – e.g., accomplish a goal, such as capturing a fugitive or ensuring safety in a high speed chase.  It can also make the tactical athlete “blind” to threats outside of their peripheral vision

Attention

Attention should never be assumed to be a limitation to vision. It includes all the senses. For instance, lack of auditory attention may result in a low noise being missed. That is, unattended stimuli often go unnoticed.

Highly arousing events like a street fight or car accident have the power to grab a persons attention involuntarily from an ongoing activity (attention rubber necking). This can result in in-attention “blindness” and have a decrease in other activates such as driving or monitoring a radio.

In fact the detection of threatening information can break up ongoing observable activity in ways that direct a persona’s  perception, attention, judgment and even memory towards a threat-related outcomes.

The bottom line is that humans have an unconsciousness system (preattentive), which automatically and constantly scans external stimuli for emotional significance. This is also true when people encounter unusual or highly informative objects and situation because they fixate faster, more often, and for longer durations on them.

In practical terms, the resulting selective attention interferes with multi-tasking because this process obstructs incoming information and doesn’t allow for the dividing of attention.

With the tactical athlete, the use of peripheral vision or perceptual scanning can be important to offset tunneling. For example, scanning for a target with known description or trying to spot suspicious activity, etc.

At one level, selective attention is good in that that it focuses all attention on overcoming an adversarial situation or goal-driven activities. At another level, it is detrimental because it may result in the subject missing or ignoring other important cues in the environment that may be required to develop an adequate mental mode or situation awareness for successful goal accomplishment.

Attention as a Spotlight

Studies have shown that in multi-modal (all senses) selective attention has been shown that when a specific location is given the attention one of the sense, the others follow. In other words, if, vision is tracking a fleeing suspect, it is wrong to assume that the auditory sensory modality is not occupied. In reality the “attention” of the auditory sense is also tracking the fleeing suspect.

In addition, modalities may lose sensitivity to other incoming sounds such as a radio call sign. In other words, the “beams of attention” of all modalities (visual, auditory, etc.) – even if just one of them is serving as a primary sensor (“visual” in the fleeing suspect example) – align together and attention turns as a spotlight with a laser beam like focus.

Optimal direction of attention is critical for the tactical athlete to successfully “orient” to a given situation in support of good decision making and action. Simply put, the individual’s attention should be drawn to cues that are most relevant to achieving the goal and he/she should be successfully able to filter out irrelevant cues. This selective filtering can be developed by training.

I hope you see how the simple act of Observe stage can be affected by numerous and various situations, events and stimuli.

With vision and mental strength training, and possibly with the help of technology this first component can be more effectively utilized.

I’d like to hear your thoughts in the comments below.