Cognitive Readiness and Decision-Making in High-Stakes Work Environments

High-stakes work environments such as spaceflight, healthcare, aviation, and emergency response place substantial demands on individuals and teams to maintain cognitive readiness for effective decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, time pressure, and risk. Although cognitive readiness has been conceptualized in different ways across disciplines, it broadly refers to the capacity of individuals and teams to prepare for, adapt to, and perform effectively in dynamic and demanding operational conditions. Despite its importance for safety and performance, cognitive readiness remains inconsistently defined and measured across domains, limiting both theoretical precision and operational integration.

Recent advances in simulation-based training, including virtual and augmented reality, and other technology-enabled approaches offer new opportunities to assess and enhance cognitive readiness in ecologically valid yet controlled settings. These approaches enable the study of decision-making processes during realistic task engagement, as well as the integration of less obtrusive behavioral, psychophysiological, and neurocognitive indicators of performance in actual operational environments. However, key questions remain regarding construct validity, training requirements, and the applicability of these methods to real-world work environments.

This Research Topic seeks to advance our understanding of cognitive readiness and decision-making in high-stakes work environments by bringing together perspectives from industrial/organizational psychology, cognitive neuroscience, human factors, and human-computer interaction. The Research Topic emphasizes applications to high-reliability work where effective performance depends on adequate training, team coordination, and real-time decision-making under pressure.
By integrating insights across disciplines, this collection aims to clarify the role of cognitive readiness in performance, evaluate emerging methods for its assessment and development, and identify pathways for enhancing decision-making in operational environments where safety and performance are critical.

Contributions that address how cognitive readiness can be assessed, developed, and sustained in workplace contexts are especially encouraged. For example, effective contributions may raise key implications for training design, performance evaluation, and operational effectiveness in high-reliability work environments.

We welcome contributions addressing:

• conceptual and theoretical models of cognitive readiness;
• decision-making under stress, workload, and uncertainty;
• simulation and technology-enabled assessment and training;
• multimodal measurement approaches;
• applications across operational contexts.

We welcome a range of article types, including Original Research, Reviews, Methods, Brief Reports, and Perspectives. Diverse research methodologies, including laboratory-based, field research, and mixed methods studies, are encouraged. Submissions that do not clearly focus on workplace or organizational contexts are not within the scope of this Research Topic.

Topic Editor Lauren Blackwell Landon is employed by KBR Wyle Services, LLC, a contractor providing services to NASA Johnson Space Center. The other Topic Editors report no competing interests.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Cognitive readiness, decision-making under uncertainty, simulation-based training, virtual reality, human factors, cognitive training, high-reliability work environments, performance assessment

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.