| Training teaches the rapid application of prescribed responses to alarms and alerts. However, real-world alerts involve more involved decisions. Practical experience shows that certain alerts are often false or that they may self-resolve in some timely manner before corrective actions are necessary. Thus, experts learn to withhold their decisions and responses until the situation warrants.;This research explored the use of two pieces of information typically not available to novices, the likelihood that an alert would self-resolve over time and the time available before the alerted critical event is likely to occur. Sixty undergraduate students participated in two forms of alert responding, one static and one dynamic. The static experiment required participants to indicate how they would respond and to estimate when they would do so. The dynamic experiment had participants wait until they judged that a response was necessary, then to select whether they would respond or not. Alerts were purported to be self-resolving 25%, 50%, or 75% of the time. However only on half of the presentations were participants given knowledge about when the alerted critical event might occur. Delay time was reported as an estimate in the static condition and was actually measured in the dynamic condition.;The results indicate that informed novices modify their alert responses in two ways. First, they are willing to wait for the alert to self-resolve if there is a likely indication that it will do so. However, acceptable delays significantly and linearly decrease as the probability to self-resolve goes down. Second, response times are adjusted to precede the time when an alerted critical event is likely to occur, when that knowledge is available. Notably, participants essentially probability matched their proportion of "true" responses to the proportion of anticipated true alerts, although in some conditions they conservatively and significantly over-responded to the alert as true. It appears that novices can behave more like experts by waiting before response action when armed with knowledge that an alert might self-resolve before a critical event is likely to occur. Implications for training and for information provided to novice users are discussed. |
