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Effective fireground decision making and "situation awareness" (SA) ([20], [21], [22] Endsley, 1987, 1995, 2000; [44] Patrick and Morgan, 2010) does not simply involve accumulating information to build good understanding of the situation, but also requires the appropriate selection from the range of information on offer, either from the external environment or the internal knowledge base of the decision maker ([7] Catherwood et al. , 2011; [26] Gasaway, 2008; [31] Klein et al. , 2010; [43] Omedei et al. , 2005).
This selective aspect of fireground decision making can be described as the "filter" or "scope" that is applied to the available knowledge about the fireground situation. It arises during the perceptual (visual, auditory, olfactory) and cognitive (attention, memory, reasoning) response to the information presented to the decision maker. In signal detection models of decision making, such selective filtering is described as "bias" ([19], [17] Edgar et al. , 2010, 2011; [16] Edgar and Edgar, 2007; [27] Green and Swets, 1966; [39] McGuinness, 2004). It represents the tendency of the fireground decision maker to accept or reject available information, including when uncertain about its accuracy. An understanding of the decision-making bias of Fire and Rescue Service (FRS) personnel and the factors affecting individual differences in bias seems critical to minimising risk in fireground decision making and yet this issue has not been researched in any systematic way. The broad aim of the current investigation is to extend current understanding of fireground decision making by determining whether such bias tendencies can be identified in FRS training exercises, with the ultimate goal being to enhance self-awareness of any such tendencies for FRS personnel.
The effectiveness of fireground decision making can be judged in terms of the correspondence between firefighter judgement of risk and the actual level of risk. Using concepts from signal detection theory ([27] Green and Swets, 1966; [54] Stanislaw and Todorov, 1999), this correspondence between judged and actual level of risk can be described as follows. Correct judgements of risk can be considered as "hits", incorrect assumptions of risk as "false alarms", overlooking of risk as "misses" and correct judgements of no risk as "correct rejections" ([5] Catherwood et al. , 2010a; [50] Saveland, 2005; [41] Moschella, 2009) (see Figure 1 [Figure omitted. See...