Carl Westin

120 Consistency and agreement in conflict resolution troller solutions, especially in terms of aircraft choice and intervention type pref- erences. 31, 32, 88 Controllers are acknowledged to differ in judgment performance 218 and how they prefer to work. 235 Differences in work-styles have been traced back to training and the style of the instructor. 87 A few ATC studies have investigated individual differences using cognitive styles. This broad research area argues that a person’s cognitive style represent heuristics (often unknown to the individual and expressed intuitively) rooted in the individual’s cognitive preferences. 37 Mogford et al. 87 used a word-shape prefer- ence test 253 to investigate controllers’ problem-solving differences. The test dis- tinguishes between a preference for relying on words as in the verbal-analytic pro- cessing style (greater activation of left cerebral hemisphere) and shapes and images as in the spatial-holistic processing style (greater activation of right cerebral hemi- sphere). Style preferences were split: 31% showed a verbal-analytic style, 22% a spatial-holistic style, and 47% showing no preference for either style. This suggests that controllers perceive and process information differently. Two other studies used the cognitive style embedded-figures test 254 to investi- gate controllers’ pattern recognition speed in a visual search task. The test differ- entiates those who quickly detected a simple figure in a larger complex one (field- independent) from those who do not detect the figure (field-dependent). Maliko- Abraham 255 found that military controllers were more field-independent (74% air force ATC and 68% naval ATC) than the control group (47% of non-controllers). Similarly, van Eck et al. 256 found that field-independence varied with years in ATC training, with controllers in their final fourth educational year being significantly more field-independent than the reference general population. While the comple- mentary results of both studies suggest a high homogeneity among controllers in pattern recognition time, there are at least two concerns. First, both studies com- pared controllers and non-controllers, rather than focusing on differences between controllers only. Second, performance variability may not be adequately captured by the dichotomous cognitive style measure. 6-3 Towards a conflict solution framework Research to date has identified generic strategies that broadly describe conflict res- olution preferences, typically limited to a few vertical and lateral resolutions. These have, however, not considered solutions in detail, such as which aircraft to interact with, the degree of a turn, or rate of a vertical intervention. Moreover, focus has pre- dominantly been on subjective techniques (e.g., interviews, focus groups, and ques- tionnaires) in combination with static scenarios. 24, 29 These fail to capture the time pressures and reactive elements of the real world that influence decision-making.