This quote is relevant wrt getting a new third mate up to speed.
“When we learn to do anything new—how to drive, for example—we go through three stages. The first stage demands a lot of attention as we try out the controls, learn the rules of driving, and so on. In the second stage we begin to coordinate our knowledge, linking movements together and more fluidly combining our actions with our knowledge of the car, the situation, and the rules. In the third stage we drive the car with barely a thought. It’s automatic. And with that our improvement at driving slows dramatically, eventually stopping completely.”
— Geoff Colvin
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A green deck officer that is at the first stage will suffer from cognitive overload and stress in situations that seem simple to a more experienced mariner.
I have seen people be absolute d!ckheads to new 3/Ms to the point where it makes you question what the f*ck is wrong with these people? Don’t you remember what it was like to be new?
I’ve found a lot of people who are like this had some dickhead yelling at them when they were new and now that they’re competent they believe that experience is what got them there. Cycle continues.
While self-satisfaction and excessive self-assurance of an inexperienced employee can be and usually are problematic in any field of our activity, the presented “learn stages” have nothing to do with the work of a watchkeeping officer.
I cannot imagine anyone on the bridge performing their duties automatically and/or thoughtlessly. While such routine thoughtlessness may be imaginable in some solitary workplaces, handling/navigating a ship is not such an activity. It is usually a team effort even when only the “green deck officer” remains on the bridge.
Weird, all the career 2nds I’ve worked with have been the most helpful. Worst guys were either career CM’s or long time CM’s that finally got promoted to Capt after like 8 years as CM.
I taught both of my sons how to drive. On a stick shift, in the HS parking lot initially, using the loading dock in the back for “hill practice”. Both of them were initially SHOCKED at how challenging it could be to coordinate all the basic bits and pieces. After all, they had sat next to their MOTHER driving a stick shift, and she had no problems at all. Of course, she was at stage three.
When they realized how stage one could be hard to master, they finally understood why the radio had to be off.
Using a stick shift is a good example, of procedural memory (aka muscle memory). An analogous task in the wheelhouse would be simple tasks such as changing scales or switching from true to relieve vectors and so forth.
Higher order tasks such as following the rules can be made easier by developing heuristics or rules of thumb which reduces cognitive work load.
With more experience an officer’s intuition would improve increasing the ability to maintain situational awareness recognizing traffic patterns, changes in the weather and so forth with less mental effort.
Here’s another article on the same subject, that of the brain ‘automating tasks’.
The article focuses on sports but also uses driving as an example:
After driving home from work listening to talkback radio, it struck me that I had no memory of the 20-minute trip.
Why? The predictive processing view of the brain has a simple and powerful explanation.
During the trip, which was uneventful, my predictive model of traffic on that specific route meshed with the sensory information during the drive. There were no surprises, such as an accident or detour, that required further processing.
In the event of an accident or a detour, further processing would have been generated, triggering increased attention.
In contrast, my grandson Hugo, who has had his “P” licence for a week, is still developing his traffic predictive model and has to process significantly more information in the model building process.
The brain uses what is called “predictive processing”
What is predictive processing?
Predictive processing breaks with the longstanding view of the brain as a computer that somehow sifts through all the sensory information it constantly receives, prioritises what is important and then decides on what action to take.
Instead, those who believe in predictive processing view the brain as constantly predicting its input based on best-bet estimations via its predictive model. It’s a case of “we see what we believe” rather than “we believe what we see”.
An experienced mariner is using far less cognitive resources than is the inexperienced mate. This can be easily seen watching a new deck officer standing watch when the workload increases.