Improving Risk Assessment in Aviation: Information Seeking, Planning, and Judgment

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Previous research on risk assessment has largely focused on static environments in which the decision maker is usually given full information to judge the level of risks involved. Research conducted under this award will extend previous research to study risk assessments by licensed pilots during pre-flight and in-flight planning, in which the pilots have to continuously look for and integrate multiple sources of information (such as weather, air traffic, and terrains) to assess risks in a highly dynamic environment. Specifically, the project will study three major classes of activities involved in pilot risk assessments: (1) information-seeking, (2) information integration during flight planning, and (3) risk assessments of different flight paths. Detailed behavioral data will be collected from a high-fidelity flight simulator. The data will be analyzed based on the theoretical framework that assumes two distinct systems of decision making: A rational system that exerts explicit top-down guidance on actions, and an experiential system that is capable of associating external environmental cues to past history of rewards and punishments. This theoretical framework will help to understand how background knowledge and skills are related to different patterns of information-seeking behavior and risk assessments in dynamic environments. The research should produce new knowledge with practical implications for training methods that improve risk assessments in dynamic environments.