decision times

[ErikW]

In practical pistol shooting we make a big deal about shooting un- or sub-consciously and making plans and decisions before shooting a course of fire. The idea is to avoid decision-making on the clock, because it's a given that conscious decision-making is slow.

I heard or read somewhere that the average person takes half a second to make a decision. Does this jibe with everybody's experience?

When I throw a bad shot, I take a make up shot immediately, with no or almost no difference in the split time compared with the planned shots, at least half that "average" .5 second decision.

But when I get a jam, I know it takes me more than a half-second to realize the anomaly of the gun not fully cycling and decide to take corrective action.

Then there are the stages where your shoot or no-shoot targets are randomly determined. Everybody shoots those stages slower, or at least has a noticeable pause while evaluating the random condition and deciding how to proceed.

I recall one extremely difficult stage (strangely and non-uniformly-patterned hardcovered targets with very little A zone available, shooting iron sights) where I failed to execute my pre-programmed reload. The extreme shooting challenge just shorted out that part of my brain.

I'd like to read more about how the human brain makes decisions and evaluations and works subconsciously. A web search proved fruitless. Anybody got any resources on this subject? I'm sure some university researchers did studies on this.

[Nik Habicht]

Erik,

I suppose you take the fast make-up shot because you've trained your mind to be on the lookout for the sight picture.  As soon as you realize that you didn't have a good sight picture, you've already preprogrammed yourself to take the make-up shot.  When you drive a car you probably encounter dangerous situations from time to time ----- how often do you react without conscious thought and just get scared when you've already safely avoided the accident?  I think that all that is pre-programming from previous experience; it's different from picking out changing no-shoots because you are not used to avoiding red targets or targets with their hands out in front of them.  To look at this another way ---- if your club set up the same stage every week with colored targets, and every week you drew a different no-shoot color, by the end of the year it really wouldn't really matter what the color was ---- you would have had enough time to learn how to evaluate targets for color instantly.

Nik.

[Singlestack]

Nik,

Your post made me think of a match where my club painted all of the steel blue! It was such a change from white it gave me fits.

John