Citation

Laxton V, Howard CJ, Guest D, Crundall D. Appl. Cogn. Psychol. 2022; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1002/acp.4038

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Lifeguards engage in a continuous process of deciding whether swimmers are in danger or not. The variety of behaviours that distressed swimmers show makes it difficult to impart declarative knowledge to this effect during lifeguard training. As an alternative, we propose a novel training tool that requires novice participants to rapidly categorise 3-second video clips of real-life swimmers as either 'safe' or 'drowning'. A control group also completed a sham intervention, with surfers that may 'fall'. Due to the complex nature of swimming pools, a scaffolded training approach was employed, which gradually increased the amount of background information over subsequent training rounds.

RESULTS demonstrated that the drowning classification training improved responses in a subsequent drowning detection test, compared to the active control-group. The scaffolded approach appeared to prepare participants for processing swimmers in the drowning-detection test. The results provide a foundation for a novel training protocol to improve lifeguard skills. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Language: en