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People can make use of a range of heuristic and rational, compensatory strategies to perform a multiple-cue judgment task. It has been proposed that people are sensitive to the amount of cognitive effort required to employ decision strategies. Experiment 1 employed a dual-task methodology to investigate whether participants' preference for heuristic versus compensatory decision strategies can be altered by increasing the cognitive demands of the task. As indicated by participants' decision times, a secondary task interfered more with the performance of a heuristic than compensatory decision strategy but did not affect the proportions of participants using either type of strategy. A stimulus set effect suggested that the conjunction of cue salience and cue validity might play a determining role in strategy selection. The results of Experiment 2 indicated that when a perceptually salient cue was also the most valid, the majority of participants preferred a single-cue heuristic strategy. Overall, the results contradict the view that heuristics are more likely to be adopted when a task is made more cognitively demanding. It is argued that people employ 2 learning processes during training, one an associative learning process in which cue-outcome associations are developed by sampling multiple cues, and another that involves the sequential examination of single cues to serve as a basis for a single-cue heuristic.

Objective: We examined the effectiveness of blue force tracking (BFT) decision support for dismounted infantry soldiers. Background: Technologies to support combat identification (CID) are rapidly evolving and may be deployable to dismounted soldiers in the future. BFT systems are designed to mitigate the risk of fratricide by supplying positional information regarding friendly units to enhance situation awareness. Method: Participants played the role of a dismounted infantry soldier in a first-person perspective gaming environment and made engagement decisions for a series of simulated targets, half of which were enemies and half of which were friends. Results: Participants performed better overall when they were able to use a BFT system than when they performed the task without assistance. When a 10-s latency was added to the updating of position information in the BFT, participants made significantly more false alarms (engaged a friendly target) regardless of whether they knew about the latency. Conclusion: The results indicate the promise of a personal BFT device to reduce the likelihood of fratricide by dismounted infantry soldiers. The results, however, also indicate that the effectiveness of such a device can be dramatically reduced when it does not provide real-time data. Application: Potential applications of this research include development of performance standards for BFT devices and assessment of decision support for dismounted soldiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In three experiments, subjects learned to classify simulated aircraft using four probabilistic cues then classified test sets designed to contrast predictions of several compensatory and non-compensatory heuristics. Results indicated that a proportion of subjects appeared to use a non-compensatory fast and frugal heuristic but that significant proportions used less frugal compensatory decision rules. The relative proportions of subjects exhibiting responses consistent with the fast and frugal heuristic versus other decision rules was largely unaffected by manipulations of time pressure and perceived cue uncertainty. An extreme time constraint, however, did result in significant differences in the proportions of subjects who preferred non-compensatory to compensatory decision rules. These results suggest that it is possible to model multi-attribute decision tasks like threat assessment with a fast and frugal heuristic although no single heuristic is a general model for the simulated threat assessment task. Copyright © 2006 Crown in the right of Canada. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an application of work-domain analysis (WDA) to the domain of the command and control of a multipurpose naval frigate-the Canadian Halifax Class frigate. This represents an application of this approach to a real system and, to the authors' knowledge, is the most extensive WDA of a naval work domain. In particular, and in contrast to other applications of cognitive work analysis, the authors extended the basic WDA framework to handle a multipurpose, loosely bound work domain. In addition, the naval domain is value driven, and this affects naval decision making. Values were incorporated as a social organizational analysis into the work-domain model and were represented as a type of soft constraint. A total of 38 submodels of the work domain were developed, whose primary models are discussed in this paper. From these models, 132 information requirements were extracted, substantiating that WDA is a worthwhile technique for supporting interface design. This paper makes a theoretical contribution by extending the WDA framework and a practical contribution by demonstrating the usefulness of the framework in a real design context. This paper concentrates on presenting WDA as a process, not as a finished product, showing intermediate levels of models and the design requirements that can be extracted from the early stages of the WDA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]