Supporting Battlefield Situation Assessment Through Attention Guidance and Diagnostic Aiding: A Cost-Benefit and Depth of Processing Analysis

摘要

Automated support systems may be useful tools for aiding situation assessment in complex environments such as the military battlefield, medical diagnosis, and crisis management. These environments are marked by large amounts of information which often must be weighted and integrated into a meaningful judgment or assessment. Two experiments examined the effects of attention cueing and decision aiding on information integration tasks in static battlefield situations. In the first experiment, sixteen participants completed a resource allocation task for 56 battlefield scenarios (based on perceived threats). For half the trials, an automated system guided their attention to high-relevance information. On 2 trials a memory probe was administered to assess the depth of processing of information, and on the final trial an automation failure was presented. Results demonstrated an overall allocation performance advantage for automation but poorer recall for automation-enhanced units. Half of the participants failed to attend to the system failure. Those participants who detected the failure were inferred to have processed all of the cues more deeply based on their performance on the memory trials. In the second part, 12 participants completed the same task using an automated diagnostic aid (instead of the attention cueing). Again, performance was improved when using automation, more so than in experiment 1. However, there were costs associated with the processing of highly relevant information in these conditions. The costs and benefits of automated cueing and diagnostic aiding are discussed.