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.

Detection of Hostile Intent by Spatial Movements.

OBJECTIVE: The ability of people to infer intentions from movement of other vessels was investigated. Across three levels of variability in movements in the path of computer-controlled ships, participants attempted to determine which entity was hostile. BACKGROUND: Detection of hostile intentions through spatial movements of vessels is important in an array of real-world scenarios. This experiment sought to determine baseline abilities of humans to do so. METHODS: Participants selected a discrete movement direction of their ship. Six other ships' locations then updated. A single entity displayed one of two hostile behaviors: shadowing, which involved mirroring the participant's vessel's movements; and hunting, which involved closing in on the participant's vessel. Trials allowed up to 35 moves before identifying the hostile ship and its behavior. Uncertainty was introduced through adding variability to ships' movements such that their path was 0%, 25%, or 50% random. RESULTS: Even with no variability in the ships' movements, accurate detection was low, identifying the hostile entity about 60% of the time. Variability in the paths decreased detection. Detection of hunting was strongly degraded by distance between ownship and the hostile ship, but shadowing was not. Strategies employing different directions of movement across the trial, but also featuring some runs of consecutive movements, facilitated detection. CONCLUSIONS: Early identification of threats based on movement characteristics alone is likely to be difficult, but particularly so when adversaries employ some level of uncertainty to mask their intentions. These findings highlight the need to develop decision aids to support human performance.

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.

Nautical Collision Avoidance : The Cognitive Challenges of Balancing Safety, Efficiency, and Procedures.

OBJECTIVE: Experimentally investigate maneuver decision preferences in navigating ships to avoid a collision. How is safety (collision avoidance) balanced against efficiency (deviation from path and delay) and rules of the road under conditions of both trajectory certainty and uncertainty. BACKGROUND: Human decision error is a prominent factor in nautical collisions, but the multiple factors of geometry of collisions and role of uncertainty have been little studied in empirical human factors literature. APPROACH: Eighty-seven Mechanical Turk participants performed in a lower fidelity ship control simulation, depicting ownship and a cargo ship hazard on collision or near-collision trajectories of various conflict geometries, while controlling heading and speed with the sluggish relative dynamics. Experiment 1 involved the hazard on a straight trajectory. In Experiment 2, the hazard could turn on unpredictable trials. Participants were rewarded for efficiency and penalized for collisions or close passes. RESULTS: Participants made few collisions, but did so more often when on a collision path. They sometimes violated the instructed rules of the road by maneuvering in front of the hazard ship's path. They preferred speed control to heading control. Performance degraded in conditions of uncertainty. CONCLUSION: Data reveal an understanding of maneuver decisions and conditions that affect the balance between safety and efficiency. APPLICATION: The simulation and data highlight the degrading role of uncertainty and provide a foundation upon which more complex questions can be asked, asked of more trained navigators, and decision support tools examined.

Anchoring and Adjustment in Uncertain Spatial Trajectory Prediction.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to explore the impact of prior information on spatial prediction and understanding of variability. BACKGROUND: In uncertain spatial prediction tasks, such as hurricane forecasting or planning search-and-rescue operations, decision makers must consider the most likely case and the distribution of possible outcomes. Base performance on these tasks is varied (and in the case of understanding the distribution, often poor). Humans must update mental models and predictions with new information, sometimes under cognitive workload. METHOD: In a spatial-trajectory prediction task, participants were anchored on accurate or inaccurate information, or not anchored, regarding the future behavior of an object (both average behavior and the variability). Subsequently, they predicted an object's future location and estimated its likelihood at multiple locations. In a second experiment, participants repeated the process under varying levels of external cognitive workload. RESULTS: Anchoring influenced understanding of most likely predicted location, with fairly rapid adjustment following inaccurate anchors. Increasing workload resulted in decreased overall performance and an impact on the adjustment component of the task. Overconfidence was present in all conditions. CONCLUSION: Prior information exerted short-term influence on spatial predictions. Cognitive load impaired users' ability to effectively adjust to new information. Accurate graphical anchors did not improve user understanding of variability. APPLICATION: Prior briefings or forecasts about spatiotemporal trajectories affect decisions even in the face of initial contradictory information. To best support spatial prediction tasks, efforts also need to be made to separate extraneous load-causing tasks from the process of integrating new information. Implications are discussed.

Effect of Visualization Training on Uncertain Spatial Trajectory Predictions.

OBJECTIVE: The goal of this study was to explore the ways in which visualizations influence the prediction of uncertain spatial trajectories (e.g., the unknown path of a downed aircraft or future path of a hurricane) and participant overconfidence in such prediction. BACKGROUND: Previous research indicated that spatial predictions of uncertain trajectories are challenging and are often associated with overconfidence. Introducing a visualization aid during training may improve the understanding of uncertainty and reduce overconfidence. METHOD: Two experiments asked participants to predict the location of various trajectories at a future time. Mean and variance estimates were compared for participants who were provided with a visualization and those who were not. RESULTS: In Experiment 1, participants exhibited less error in mean estimations when a linear visualization was present but performed worse than controls once the visualization was removed. Similar results were shown in Experiment 2, with a nonlinear visualization. However, in both experiments, participants who were provided with a visualization did not retain any advantage in their variance estimations once the visualization was removed. CONCLUSIONS: Visualizations may support spatial predictions under uncertainty, but they are associated with benefits and costs for the underlying knowledge being developed. APPLICATION: Visualizations have the potential to influence how people make spatial predictions in the presence of uncertainty. Properly designed and implemented visualizations may help mitigate the cognitive biases related to such predictions.

Overconfidence in Projecting Uncertain Spatial Trajectories.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to understand factors that influence the prediction of uncertain spatial trajectories (e.g., the future path of a hurricane or ship) and the role of human overconfidence in such prediction. BACKGROUND: Research has indicated that human prediction of uncertain trajectories is difficult and may well be subject to overconfidence in the accuracy of forecasts as is found in event prediction, a finding that indicates that humans insufficiently appreciate the contributions of variance in nature to their predictions. METHOD: In two experiments, our paradigm required participants to observe a starting point, a position at time T, and then make a prediction of the location of the trajectory at time NT. They experienced several trajectories from the same underlying model but perturbed by random variance in heading and speed. RESULTS: In Experiment 1A, people predicted linear paths well and were better in heading predictions than in speed predictions. However, participants greatly underestimated the variance in predicted location, indicating overconfidence. In Experiment 1B, the effect was replicated with frequencies rather than probabilities used in variance estimates. In Experiment 2, people predicted nonlinear trajectories poorly, and overconfidence was again observed. Overconfidence was reduced on the more difficult predictions. In both main experiments, those better at predicting the mean were not better at predicting the variance. CONCLUSIONS: Predicting the level of uncertainty in spatial trajectories is not well done and may involve qualitatively different abilities than prediction of the mean. APPLICATION: Improving real-world performance at prediction demands developing better understanding of variability, not just the average case. Biases in prediction of uncertainty may be addressed through debiasing training and/or visualization tools that could assist in more calibrated action planning.

Interruption management: the use of attention-directing tactile cues.

Previous research has suggested that providing informative cues about interrupting stimuli aids management of multiple tasks. However, auditory and visual cues can be ineffective in certain situations. The objective of the present study was to explore whether attention-directing tactile cues aid or interfere with performance. A two-group posttest-only randomized experiment was conducted. Sixty-one participants completed a 30-min performance session consisting of aircraft-monitoring and gauge-reading computer tasks. Tactile signals were administered to a treatment group to indicate the arrival and location of interrupting tasks. Control participants had to remember to visually check for the interrupting tasks. Participants in the treatment group responded to more interrupting tasks and responded faster than did control participants. Groups did not differ on error rates for the interrupting tasks, performance of the primary task, or subjective workload perceptions. In the context of the tasks used in the present research, tactile cues allowed participants to effectively direct attention where needed without disrupting ongoing information processing. Tactile cues should be explored in a variety of other visual, interrupt-laden environments. Potential applications exist for aviation, user-interface design, vigilance tasks, and team environments.