Supporting detection of hostile intentions: automated assistance in a dynamic decision-making context.

In a dynamic decision-making task simulating basic ship movements, participants attempted, through a series of actions, to elicit and identify which one of six other ships was exhibiting either of two hostile behaviors. A high-performing, although imperfect, automated attention aid was introduced. It visually highlighted the ship categorized by an algorithm as the most likely to be hostile. Half of participants also received automation transparency in the form of a statement about why the hostile ship was highlighted. Results indicated that while the aid's advice was often complied with and hence led to higher accuracy with a shorter response time, detection was still suboptimal. Additionally, transparency had limited impacts on all aspects of performance. Implications for detection of hostile intentions and the challenges of supporting dynamic decision making are discussed.

Rendezvous Under Temporal Uncertainty.

OBJECTIVE: Three experiments sought to understand performance limitations in controlling a ship attempting to meet another moving ship that approached from various trajectories. The influence of uncertainty, resulting from occasional unpredictable delays in one's own movement, was examined. BACKGROUND: Cognitive elements of rendezvous have been little studied. Related work such as the planning fallacy and bias toward underestimating time-to-contact imply a tendency toward late arrival at a rendezvous. METHODS: In a simplified simulation, participants controlled the speed and/or heading of their own ship once per scenario to try to rendezvous with another ship. Forty-five scenarios of approximately 30 s were conducted with different starting geometries and, in two of three experiments, with different frequencies and lengths of the unexpected delays. RESULTS: Perfect rendezvous were hard to obtain, with a general tendency to arrive late and pass behind the target vessel, although this was dependent on the angle of approach and relative speed. When occasional delays were introduced, less frequent but longer delays disrupted performance more than shorter but more frequent delays. Where delays were possible, but no delay occurred, there was no longer evidence of a general tendency to more frequently pass behind the target ship. Additionally, people did not wait to see if the unpredictable delays would occur before executing a course of action. Different control strategies were deployed and dual axis control was preferred. CONCLUSIONS: The tendency to arrive late and the influence of the possibility of uncertain delays are discussed in relationship to control strategies.

How history trails and set size influence detection of hostile intentions.

Previous research suggests people struggle to detect a series of movements that might imply hostile intentions of a vessel, yet this ability is crucial in many real world Naval scenarios. To investigate possible mechanisms for improving performance, participants engaged in a simple, simulated ship movement task. One of two hostile behaviors were present in one of the vessels: Shadowing-mirroring the participant's vessel's movements; and Hunting-closing in on the participant's vessel. In the first experiment, history trails, showing the previous nine positions of each ship connected by a line, were introduced as a potential diagnostic aid. In a second experiment, the number of computer-controlled ships on the screen also varied. Smaller set size improved detection performance. History trails also consistently improved detection performance for both behaviors, although still falling well short of optimal, even with the smaller set size. These findings suggest that working memory plays a critical role in performance on this dynamic decision making task, and the constraints of working memory capacity can be decreased through a simple visual aid and an overall reduction in the number of objects being tracked. The implications for the detection of hostile intentions are discussed.