Similarity and Priority of the Submarine Officer of the Deck: Assessing Knowledge Structures

Abstract

It is increasingly being recognized that understanding expert knowledge structures associated with critical decision processes may facilitate Naval personnel performance. Toward this, system developers and training researchers attempt to identify critical components of expert operator assessment and knowledge. Differing domains of practice rely to varying degrees on perceptual and conceptual knowledge. Perceptual knowledge is relied upon for recognizing critical cues in the environment whereas conceptual knowledge is used to interpret the meaning and importance of these cues. We focus on conceptual knowledge given its importance in the submariner environment. Via analyses of submariner knowledge for concepts related to responsibilities for the Officer of the Deck (OOD) watchstander we examined how training may alter knowledge representation and priority of conceptual importance and how overlap in mental models may be due to amount of experience.