Decision support for competent and expert firefighters

Decision support systems have been proposed as a mechanism through which operator performance can be improved. However, before such systems can be implemented, the interaction between the system and the user needs to be understood. The current study investigated competent and expert firefighters' interaction with three levels of decision support system interfaces, one full processing interface, and two levels of reduced processing interfaces. The results revealed that competent firefighters accessed significantly more feature displays and made significantly more recursions of feature displays than expert fire fighters when using the Full processing DSS interface. However, this difference was not evident when participants used the reduced processing interfaces. Expert firefighters made more accurate decisions than competent firefighters, possibly due to the acquisition of features that were more relevant to the decision task. Therefore, mechanisms may be needed to ensure that competent operators process relevant information when making decisions.