Cognitive Failures in Military Air Traffic Control

As performance becomes skilled, less and less attention seems to be required to be devoted to it. As the Cambridge psychologist Sir Frederick Bartlett once perceptively remarked, “The skilled batsman has all the time in the world.” Implicitly, the more skill is gained, the more behavior is delegated to the emission of well-drilled responses, and the more attention may be paid to the anticipation of events, and the grander aspects of the overall plan. Despite the enormous gains in performance by organizing motor behavior in this way, however, if there is a trade-off between attention being paid to the larger aspects of the plan at the expense of attending to the details of motor control, the scope for minor errors in execution remaining undetected may increase.