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

Abstract

Automated support systems may be useful tools for aiding situation assessment in complex environments such as the military battlefield. These environments are marked by large amounts of information which often must be weighted and integrated into a meaningful judgment or assessment. The present research examines the effects of attention cueing on information integration tasks in static battlefield situations. 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-threat units. 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 the cues more deeply on the memory trials. The costs and benefits of automated cueing are discussed.