Research may help police training
Posted Feb 7, 2012 2:16 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A study from the University of Calgary shows promise as a valuable new tool to train police officers.
Professor Joan Vickers monitored the eye movement of officers in training scenarios, where the assailant draws either a cell phone or a gun. The trainees were left with a split second decision to either shoot or hold fire.
Vickers has been researching the gaze of high performance athletes for decades and is now working with police to understand what she calls ‘the quiet eye.’
“It’s the last thing you see before you have to make a critical movement. So, in this police study it was what your eye was stable on for at least 100 milliseconds before you’d pull the trigger,” says Vickers.
She says that 100 milliseconds could mean the difference between life and death.
In training exercises with officers from another jurisdiction, 65 per cent of rookie police officers fired on a man with a cell phone. Just 18 per cent of the elite shooters did the same. She says the difference between them was ‘the quiet eye.’
