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Hicks Law

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almost 3 years ago

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Hicks Law?
Hicks Legacy : Reaction Time In Combat

By W. Hock Hochheim
If you are reacting to an attack, as the good guys generally are, you are already behind the action curve. How behind, scientists have labored intensely to discover over the last 50 years, and like splitting the atom, they have split the single second into one thousand parts to do it.
It was about 25 years ago when I attended a police defensive tactics course and was rather insulted by the attitude of the instructor. We were treated like Neanderthals. He declared, “KISS! Keep it simple, stupid. Hick’s Law says that it takes your mind too long to choose between two tactics. Worse with three! Therefore, I will show you one response. " I wondered then and there, "Am I to stay simple and stupid my whole life? Who is this Hick and waht is his law?"
It takes too long? How long was long, I wondered? We learned one block versus a high punch that day. What about against a low punch, I thought? My one high block fails to cover much else but that one high attack.
***
Later that evening while coaching my son’s little league baseball team, I saw this very instructor coaching his team on another ball field. He was teaching ten year-olds to multi-task and make split-second decisions as his infielders, working double plays with runners on base. It was clear the coach expected more from these kids than he did from we adult cops that morning. Hick’s Law was not to be found on that kid's diamond.
Hick’s Law, started out as a paper written in 1952 and simply set up an equation that states the mind takes time to decide between options. For the record, the equation is TR+a+b{Log2 (N)}. Another famous police trainer mentioning Hick's law said:
“Lag time increases significantly with the greater number of techniques.”
Significantly and greater number are the key unknowns in that equation. What is significant and how many are greater. Others say:
" ...it takes 58% more time to pick between two choices."
58% sounds like a lot, but 58% of what? Others, usually police instructors, cavalierly say:
“...it takes about a second to pick a tactic.” and,
“Selection time gets compounded exponentially when a person has to select from several choices,”
Many modern instructors just associate a doubling ratio to Hicks-that is, for every two choices, selection time doubles per added choice.Yet, despite all these quotes on times, Hick made no official proclamation on the milliseconds it takes to decide between options. There is a general consensus in the modern Kinesiology community that Simple Reaction Time, called SRT, takes an average of 150 milliseconds to decide to take an action. That’s considerably less than a quarter of a second-or 250 milliseconds. Lets re-establish that there are 1,000 milliseconds in one second-a fact that makes all these time studies fall into proper perspective. 1,000!
Based on the doubling rule with the common SRT average, then choosing between two choices must take 300 milliseconds. Run out the time-table. Three choices? 600 milliseconds. Four choices? 1 second and 200 milliseconds. A mere five choices? 2 seconds and 400 milliseconds! Six? 4 full seconds and 800 milliseconds. Should a boxer learn 5 tactics? That would mean 9 seconds and 600 milliseconds to choose one tactic from another? You would really see people physically shut down while trying to select options at this point and beyond. Has this been your viewing experience of a football game? Basketball? Tennis? Has this been your experience as a witness to life?
One begins to wonder how a football game can be played, how a jazz pianist functions, or how a bicyclist can pedal himself in a New York City rush hour. How does a boxer, who sees a spilt-second opening, select a jab, cross, hook, uppercut, overhand, or to step back straight, right or left? If he dares to throw combination punches how can he select them so quickly?
Under this exponential increase rule, it would seem athletes would stand dumbfounded, as index cards rolled through their heads in an attempt to pick a choice of action. Every eye jab could not be blocked if the blocker was taught even just two blocks. The eye attack would hit the eyes as the defender sluggishly selects between the two blocks.
Athletic performance studies attack the doubling rule. We need not only look to athletes. How can a typist type so quickly? Look at all the selections on a computer? 26 letters-plus options! How can your read this typed essay? How can your mind select and process from 26 different letters in the alphabet? It is obvious that the exponential rule of “doubling” with each option, has serious scientific problems when you run a math table out.
Hick’s Law has become barely a sketch or an outline for the thousands of performance experiments in laboratories since 1952. New tests upon new tests on skills like driving vehicles, flying, sports and psychology, have created so many layers of fresh information. Larish and Stelmach in 1982 established that one could select from 20 complex options in 340 milliseconds, providing the complex choices have been previously trained. One other study even had a reaction time of .03 milliseconds between two trained choices! .03! Merkel’s Law, for example, says that trouble begins when a person has to select between 8 choices, but can still select a choice from the eight well under 500 milliseconds. Brace yourself! Mowbray and Rhoades Law of 1959, or the Welford Law of 1986, found no difference in reaction time at all, when selecting from numerous, well-trained choices.
Why the time differences? I conducted an email survey of 50 college university professors of Psychology and Kinesiology. It is crystal clear that training makes a considerable difference. Plus-people, tests and testing equipment are different. Respondents state that every person and the skills they perform in tests vary, so reaction times vary. One universal difficulty mentioned by researchers is the mechanical task of splitting the second in their test-that is identifying the exact millisecond that the tested reaction took place. Many recorded tests are performed by under-grads in less than favorable conditions.
The test-givers themselves have reaction time issues that effect time recording! Milliseconds are wasted as the tester sees the testee react, then reacts with a stopwatch device, either estimating or losing milliseconds in their own reaction process. Common test machinery takes milliseconds to register a choice. Results can get vague and slippery within the tiny world of a single second. Documenting milliseconds in the 1950s was almost impossible even in the most sophisticated labs, yet modern instructors ignore modern research and use the 1950s numbers to base their training methodolgies.
Six decades of performance testing have passed, with new technology and on regular "walk-around" people along with low, medium and high performance sports athletes. New methodologies have been created to increase SRT and selection times. Training like;
<>Sequential Learning- the stringing of tasks working together like connected notes in music, really reduces reaction and selection time.
<>Conceptual Learning is another speed track. In relation to survival training, this means a person first makes an either/or conceptual decision, like “Shoot/Don’t shoot,” or, “Move-In/Move Back.” Rather than selecting from a series of hand strikes, in Conceptual Learning, the boxer does not waste milliseconds selecting specific punches, but rather makes one overall decision, “punch many times!” The trained body then takes over, following paths learned from prior repetition training.
Sure, simple is good. I am all for simple. And reaction time is an important concern when you are dodging a knife, pulling a gun, etc. There comes a point in a learning progression when there are too many reactions/techniques to an attack. On the other end of Hock's Law continuum is the brick wall called "Hyper-Vigilance," the subject of another essay.
For myself, I like to go about three-deep per response as a general rule. Four may be pushing the limit for the moderate student, though I know students who can handle way more. As a professional instructor, I busy myself learning more than three options, so I can teach the best three to differing skill-levels and body shapes.
Before trainers start bringing up Hick’s Law they need to know the rest of the science since the 1950s, that improved training really decreases reaction time, and not use Hick as an excuse to cage us down to one-step, dumb Neanderthals.
It seems like the last 6 decades, Hick’s Law has become a legacy of research. Hick’s Legacy is really telling us to train more and smarter, not necessarily to be stupid and learn less. Remember one of Einstein’s Laws-“Keep it simple…but not too simple.” I like the sound of that much better than stupid instructors KISSING me to keep things stupid.

Adendum....Must Read!
These discoveries made in 1990s, decades after the 1950s Hicks law began, blowing the original, antiquated "mental rolladex/task selection" concept out of the water. The brain has a fast track! Below, Martin D. Topper, Ph.D., Jack M. Feldman, Ph.D. write about them...
"...Currently, the best explanation is provided by psychologist Gary Klein in Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. He's proposed that the human brain is capable of multi-tasking. His theory works like this: A visual image is picked up by the retina and is transmitted to the visual center of the brain in the occipital lobe. From there the image is sent to two locations in the brain. On the one hand, it goes to the higher levels of the cerebral cortex which is the seat of full conscious awareness. There, in the frontal lobes, the image is available to be recognized, analyzed, input into a decision process and acted upon as the person considers appropriate. Let's call this "the slow track," because full recognition of the meaning of a visual image, analyzing what it represents, deciding what to do and then doing it takes time. Some psychologists also refer to this mental process as System II cognition. If you used System II cognition in critical situations like a skid, you wouldn't have enough time to finish processing the OODA Loop before your car went over the cliff.

Fortunately, there's a second track, which we'll call "the fast track," or System I Cognition. In this system, the image is also sent to a lower, pre-conscious region of the brain, which is the amygdala. This area of the brain stores visual memory and performs other mental operations as well. The visual image is compared here on a pre-conscious level at incredible speed with many thousands of images that are stored in memory. Let's call each image a "frame" which is a term that Dr. Erving Goffman used in his book Frame Analysis to describe specific, cognitively-bounded sets of environmental conditions. I like to use the word "frame" here because the memory probably contains more than just visual information. There may be sound, kinesthetic, tactile, olfactory or other sensory information that also helps complement the visual image contained within the frame...fortunately, the fast and slow tracks are usually complimentary, one focusing on insight, the other on action. Together they produce a synergistic effect that enhances the actor's chances of survival.

But even though these two tracks are complimentary, we know that some people seem to be much more skilled than others at integrating System 1 and System 2. These especially competent individuals seem to resolve critical situations and also adapt to rapid changes in those situations. They invent routines they have never before performed and act in a fluid, seamless manner without employing full focal awareness.

So at this point in our understanding, we have a model that tells us something about how the brain can operate on two tracks at the same time, but we don't really have a good idea of how the two levels interact, except to say that the interaction is very complex, and some people do it better than others. We really don't know everything we'd like to know. But we do know that specific types of training can help a person develop unconscious competence, and this is enough to make some suggestions about the kind of training that will help make relatively unskilled people more competent in finding solutions to potentially violent encounters.