Our eyes are our primary survival sense but they evolved long before firearms were created. Perceptual distortions under acute stress can radically affect officer performance, and understanding them is critical. Ret. Sgt. Jeff Quail, a 25-year veteran of the Winnipeg Police Service (WPS), has made that his mission. He spoke to Katherine Aldred about the limits of human reaction, and how to mitigate them.
What's your training background?
I was at the [WPS] training academy as the assistant officer safety co-ordinator and then ultimately as the officer safety co-ordinator. Which placed me in charge of our defensive tactics training and weapons training. I now work as the full-time director of research and development for Setcan Corporation.
What do we know about visual distortions under acute stress?
From a physiological perspective, the theory is that when we induce acute stress, the sympathetic nervous system is activated and a massive release of hormones occurs. Everyone's most familiar with adrenaline. Adrenaline has been shown to act upon the ciliary muscle of the eye by causing the muscle to relax. When it relaxes, it causes the lens of the eye to flatten. When that happens, our eye is better designed for seeing far than seeing near. So from a physiological perspective, we might, under stress, have the inability to acutely see the sights of our weapons.
That's rather critical. What else can happen under stress?
The flip side of the physiological perspective is the visual cognitive processing side. A lot of research has been done on what's called a weapons-focus effect. Under stress, some individuals will focus intently or fixate on the weapon itself as opposed to the centre mass of the target. But we're still in our infancy of understanding precisely how these and other visual distortions occur.
How can police apply this knowledge?
Number one is that we have to accept these changes are a reality. We still can't predict what distortions will happen and when they will happen, but we must accept that there's a probability they'll happen when an individual is experiencing acute stress. Once we accept that, then we can say, "OK, how do we prepare the individual for this possibility so they can perform better?"
And how can police do that?
There are three approaches from a training perspective. The first is a stress-congruent approach. We know that an individual who's attacked suddenly and spontaneously at close distance will not be able to insert a trained response. They're going to have an instinctual, autonomic reflexive reaction that's going to occur at the onset of the attack. This reflex to move away or pull their limbs away — the natural flinch response — is going to occur before they can even get to the part of the brain where that training exists. So with stress-congruent, we accept the realities that we can't change our natural response. This is what you're going to do, you're going to flinch, this is how your body is going to behave and then after this occurs, we can insert the trained response.
Next are stress-mitigation techniques. The less stress reaction you have, the fewer hormones are released into your body, and the less potential there is for distortions to occur. There are various stress-mitigation techniques that can be taught, but it's easier said than done. If you're scared of heights and go on a roller coaster and are told, "Hey, don't get scared," well, when you're going over the top of a big drop off you're going to have a reaction. But this approach is more useful for controlling arousal that's unfolding slowly than controlling a sudden event.
The last method is the principle of overlearning. And that's looking at critical items that the officer needs to be able to perform, and doing so many repetitions of that action that it moves to an unconscious competent level. Take a stoppage in a firearm. Somebody pulls a trigger, it doesn't go bang and they go through their stoppage drill to get that firearm working again. So we do so much repetition of it that we no longer have to use the conscious part of our brain to say, "OK, I've got to tap the bottom of the magazine and then I've gotta rack it, and then I've gotta … " it's just going to happen automatically.
Where can officers learn more?
There are a lot of phenomenal law enforcement trainers and military trainers and phenomenal academics that have an incredible expertise in this area. And I would encourage individuals who have an interest or who want this type of training to seek them out.