Experience Does Not Equal Expertise in Recognizing Infrequent Incoming Gunfire: Neural Markers for Experience and Task Expertise at Peak Behavioral Performance

For a soldier, decisions to use force can happen rapidly and sometimes lead to undesired consequences. In many of these situations, there is a rapid assessment by the shooter that recognizes a threat and responds to it with return fire. But the neural processes underlying these rapid decisions are largely unknown, especially amongst those with extensive weapons experience and expertise. In this paper, we investigate differences in weapons experts and non-experts during an incoming gunfire detection task. Specifically, we analyzed the electroencephalography (EEG) of eleven expert marksmen/soldiers and eleven non-experts while they listened to an audio scene consisting of a sequence of incoming and non-incoming gunfire events. Subjects were tasked with identifying each event as quickly as possible and committing their choice via a motor response. Contrary to our hypothesis, experts did not have significantly better behavioral performance or faster response time than novices. Rather, novices indicated trends of better behavioral performance than experts. These group differences were more dramatic in the EEG correlates of incoming gunfire detection. Using machine learning, we found condition-discriminating EEG activity among novices showing greater magnitude and covering longer periods than those found in experts. We also compared group-level source reconstruction on the maximum discriminating neural correlates and found that each group uses different neural structures to perform the task. From condition-discriminating EEG and source localization, we found that experts perceive more categorical overlap between incoming and non-incoming gunfire. Consequently, the experts did not perform as well behaviorally as the novices. We explain these unexpected group differences as a consequence of experience with gunfire not being equivalent to expertise in recognizing incoming gunfire.