Perceptual Learning and Watchstanding
Perceptual learning is a key element in the acquisition of navigation skill whether on foot, driving a car, or conning a ship.
In my experience, maintaining a bridge watch using “all available means” efficiently and effectively requires that visual observation form the foundation, with instruments refining and extending that foundation.
From Marine Public’s post Mastering Lookout Techniques for Safer Navigation at Sea, regarding “all available means”:
“Visual observation forms the foundation, but RADAR, AIS, radio communication, and other tools must supplement human senses. Failing to use available instruments when circumstances demand them violates this fundamental rule.”
Mariners readily accept that restricted visibility, dense fog for example, increases risk and workload. Good visibility increases available information. Poor visual skill reduces it almost as effectively as fog.
Instruments are indispensable. But they cannot compensate for a failure to perceive what is directly available outside the window.
Some History
After radar was first installed aboard commercial ships, a pattern emerged: so-called “radar-assisted collisions.” Officers were misinterpreting radar information. The industry recognized a training gap. Formal radar plotting courses became mandatory.
When ARPA systems automated plotting, providing course, speed, CPA, and TCPA structured training and certification were again required. The maritime industry understood that when new technology alters watchstanding practice, structured training must follow.
Impact of Technology
While captains and experienced mariners have long warned that excessive dependence on screens, ARPA, ECDIS, AIS, can degrade watchstanding performance, this concern has not been fully absorbed by the industry.
Training, testing, and credentialing have focused heavily on technical competence with these systems, while giving far less attention to how screen-mediated navigation (including collision avoidance) affects overall situational awareness.
Even the design of many modern wheelhouses encourages screen dependency.
The Current Situation
For many watch officers, radar and ECDIS, supplemented by occasional glances out the window, are sufficient to carry out basic navigation and collision-avoidance duties on open-ocean routes with light traffic.
In heavily trafficked waters, the Malacca and Singapore Straits, the South China Sea an officer relying primarily on screens will quickly approach a workload ceiling. In such environments an additional officer is often required to manage the cognitive load.
The Problem
The issue is not effectiveness, but the time and exposure required to develop confidence in visual skill.
While it may take years to become a seasoned deck officer, gaining functional confidence on the bridge often takes only months.
During that period, however, junior officers operate in a high-stakes environment where mistakes carry serious consequences. In such conditions, instruments feel safer than direct perception
As a result, many officers never fully develop trust in their own visual judgment. Screens become the primary reference; the outside world becomes confirmation.
The Solution
The goal is not reduced reliance on instruments, but a reframing of watchstanding.
The bridge functions as one orientation system. Visual cues and instrument data should constantly cross-check and refine each other. Instruments refine and confirm what is first perceived outside the window. They do not replace it.
Training, therefore, should treat visual skill as foundational rather than incidental.
Perceptual Learning in Practice
Early in my career I shipped as mate on an Aleutian freighter, The Snowbird, running the Inside Passage. That alone was eye-opening. The vessel lacked several tools I had grown accustomed to, alone in the bridge, no full chart plot, no gyro-stabilized radar. Navigation was largely by eye, supplemented by radar.
The first trip from Seattle to Dutch Harbor and back involved a very steep learning curve. The key was gaining confidence in navigation by eye.
Later I sailed as mate on a tug and tow on the same waters. The captain had extensive experience towing log barges at very low speeds, work that demands close attention to current.
I thought I understood navigation in the Inside Passage. But Captain Jerry introduced me to the risks of getting “in irons” in strong currents. He used the terms “fast water” and “slow water.” to describe the main current and counter current. Tug in slow water and barge in fast water, to be avoided.
He pointed out subtle differences on the surface of the water, visible distinctions between fast water and slow water.
I had spent years navigating the Inside Passage. I had watched the surface of the water countless times. But I had never attended to it in that way.
Once my attention was directed, the distinctions were obvious. They had been visible all along.
Perceptual Learning in Principle
Perceptual learning begins with attention. As William James wrote in The Principles of Psychology (1890):
“My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind - without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.”
The phenomenon Captain Jerry described, fast water and slow water, was always there to be seen. I lacked not eyesight, but experience.
Likewise, watch officers who use screens as their foundation and glance outside only intermittently are gaining experience with out-the-window information but very slowly.
Skills that should take days or weeks to develop may instead take years.
Conclusion
The value of deliberate practice in accelerating perceptual learning is supported by both science and experience.
The issue is not nostalgia or resistance to technology. The question is whether training deliberately cultivates the perceptual abilities which gives instrument data it's operational meaning.
Until visual skill is treated as something that must be trained, not merely assumed, the industry will continue to produce officers who are technically proficient yet perceptually underdeveloped.
Previous post: Reducing Information overload in heavy Ship traffic
Sources
Perceptual learning - Wikipedia
PERCEPTUAL LEARNING: DIFFERENTIATIONOR ENRICHMENT?1JAMES J. GIBSON AND ELEANOR J. GIBSON
The Perception of the Visual World - Gibson
Below ("Read more") is Mark Twain's take on his perceptual learning as a Mississippi River steamboat pilot
Notes
Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi has a excellent passage on his perceptual learning journey.
First, Twain describes, before he became a river pilot how he had enjoyed a sunset, then after learning to read the river:
Before:
I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them.
After learning to pilot a steamboat:
Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, after this fashion: This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling 'boils' show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the 'break' from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark.
No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat.
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