Strategy Constancy Amidst Implementation Differences: Interaction-Intensive Versus Memory-Intensive Adaptations To Information Access In Decision-Making

Over the last two decades attempts to quantify decision-making have established that, under a wide range of conditions, people trade-off effectiveness for efficiency in the strategies they adopt. However, as interesting, significant, and influential as this research has been, its scope is limited by three factors; the coarseness of how effort was measured, the confounding of the costs of steps in the decision-making algorithm with the costs of steps in a given task environment, and the static nature of the decision tasks studied. In the current study, we embedded a decision-making task in a dynamic task environment and varied the cost required for the information access step. Across three conditions, small changes in the cost of interactive behavior led to changes in the strategy adopted for decision-making as well as to differences in how a step in the same strategy was implemented

Comparison of Distributed Versus Collocated Command Group Collaboration Performance

The transformation of the United States Army to a combat force capable of operating successfully on future battlefields requires the leveraging of digital communication capabilities to support distributed battle command. The purpose of this study is to investigate collaborative command group planning performance in traditional face-to-face (collocated) and geographically dispersed group (distributed) conditions. The Reactive Planning Strategies Simulation (REPSS) system was developed to provide a realistic group planning task supporting empirical estimates of planning process and performance outcome success, measured in this context as delivery rate of humanitarian supplies. Results indicate that synchronization scores were not significantly different between conditions; however, they were highly correlated with command group humanitarian supply delivery rates when collapsed across both collocated and distributed\u27 conditions. Furthermore, collocated command groups delivered humanitarian supplies at a higher rate than did distributed command groups. This difference was primarily due to the cumulative effect of poor decision making across the multiple decision points required of the command groups during the exercise

Designing Emergency Response Dispatch Systems for Better Dispatcher Performance

Emergency response systems are a relatively new and important area of research in the information systems community. While there is a growing body of literature in this research stream, human-computer interaction (HCI) issues concerning the design of emergency response system interfaces have received limited attention. Emergency responders often work in time pressured situations and depend on fast access to key information. One of the problems studied in HCI research is the design of interfaces to improve user information selection and processing performance. Based on cue-summation theory and research findings on parallel processing, associative processing, and hemispheric differences in information processing, this study proposes that information selection of target information in an emergency response dispatch application can be improved by using supplementary cues. Color-coding and sorting are proposed as relevant cues that can improve processing performance by providing prioritization heuristics. An experimental emergency response dispatch application is developed, and user performance is tested under conditions of varying complexity and time pressure. The results suggest that supplementary cues significantly improve performance, with better results often obtained when both cues are used. Additionally, the use of these cues becomes more beneficial as time pressure and task complexity increase

Adaptive User Interfaces in Complex Supervisory Tasks

School of Electrical and Computer Engineerin

On Self Organising Cyberdynamic Policy

The de facto model of what it means to be effectively organised, hence cybernetically viable, is Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM). Many studies attest to the efficacy of what the VSM proposes, however, these appear to be largely confined to human based organisations of particular types e.g. businesses of assorted sizes and governmental matters. The original contribution to the body of knowledge that this work makes, in contrast, has come from an unconventional source i.e. football (soccer) teams. The unique opportunity identified was to use the vast amounts of football player spatial data, as captured by match scanning technology, to obtain simultaneously the multi-recursive policy characteristics of a real viable system operating in real time under highly dynamical load (threat/opportunity) conditions. It accomplishes this by considering player movement as being representative of the output of the policy function of the viable system model that they, hence their whole team, are each mapped to. As each player decides what they must do at any moment, or might need to do in the immediate future, this is set against their capabilities to deliver against that. This can be said of every player during every stage of any match. As such, their actions (their policies as viable systems) inform, and are informed by, the actions of others. This results in the teams of players behaving in a self-organising manner. Accordingly, in spatially varying player location, one has a single metric that characterises player, hence team function, and ultimately whole team policy as the policy of a viable system, that is amenable to analysis. A key behavioural characteristic of a self-organising system is a power law. Accordingly, by searching for, and obtaining, a power law associated with player movement one thereby obtains the output of the policy function of that whole team as a viable system, and hence the viable system model that the team maps to. At the heart of such activity is communication between the players as they proceed to do what they need to do at any given time during a match. This has offered another unique opportunity to measure the amount of spatially underpinned Information exhibited by the opposing teams in their entirety and to set those in juxtaposition with their respective power law characteristics and associated match outcomes. This meant that the power law characteristic that represents the policy of the viable system, and the amount of Information associated with that could be, and was, examined in the context of success or failure outcomes (as criteria of viability) to discern if some combinations of both were more profitable than not. This was accomplished in this work by using player position data from an anonymous member of the English Premier Football League playing in an unknown season to provide a quantitative analysis accordingly