Too Much,Too Little or Just Right: Designing Data Fusion for Situation Awareness

Abstract

Many operators within the battlefield find themselves unable to process all the data presented to them in the limited time available. Data fusion provides a means of reducing their workload, but can also reduce system transparency. Thus, either too much or too little fusion can lead to reduced operator situation awareness. A framework is proposed that incorporates a role for more sophisticated psychological theory when attempting to understand the consequences of data fusion technologies on SA. Four key questions are identified: How should the level of certainty in fused information be presented? How much does it cost the operator to “drill-down”? To what extent does data fusion inhibit representation change? Does data fusion ameliorate or exacerbate the consequences of interruption?

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Aeronautica Civil of The Republic of Colombia Aircraft Accident Report: Controlled Flight Into Terrain, American Airlines Flight 965, Boeing 757-223, N651AA, Near Cali, Colombia, December 20, 1995. Santafe de Bogota, D.C.-Colombia.

Anderson

J. R.

(1990) The Adaptive Character of Thought. Erlbaum: Hillsdale, NJ.

Bainbridge

(1983). Ironies of automation. Automatica, 19, 775–779.

Ballard

D. H.

Hayhoe

M. M.

Pook

P. K.

Rao

R. P. N.

(1997). Deictic codes for the embodiment of cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 20, 723–767.

Banbury

Selcon

Endsley

Gorton

Tatlock

(1998). Being uncertain about uncertainty: How the representation of system reliability affects pilot decision-making. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Conference. Chicago, USA.

Banbury

Tremblay

(2004). A Cognitive Approach to Situation Awareness: Theory and Application. Ashgate Publishing Ltd.: Aldershot, UK.

Duggan

G. B.

Payne

S. J.

(2001). Interleaving reading and acting while following procedural instructions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 7, 297–307.

Endsley

M. R.

(1995). Toward a theory of situation awareness. Human Factors, 37, 32–64.

Gigerenzer

Goldstein

D. G.

(1996). Reasoning the fast and frugal way: Models of bounded rationality. Psychological Review, 103, 650–669.

10.

Gray

W. D.

W-T.

(2004). Soft constraints in interactive behavior: The case of ignoring perfect knowledge in-the-world for imperfect knowledge in-the-head. Cognitive Science, 28, 359–382.

11.

Kahneman

Slovic

Tversky

(1982). Judgement under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Cambridge University Press: New York, USA.

12.

McFarlane

D. C.

(2002). Comparison of four primary methods for coordinating the interruption of people in human-computer interaction. Human computer interaction, 2002, 17, 63–139.

13.

McNamara

D. S.

Kintsch

Songer

N. B.

Kintsch

(1996). Are good texts always better? Interactions of text coherence, background knowledge, and levels of understanding in learning from text. Cognition and Instruction, 14, 1–43.

14.

Palmiter

Elkerton

Bagget

(1991). Animated demonstrations vs written instructions for learning procedural tasks: A preliminary investigation. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 34, 687–701.

15.

Payne

S. J.

Howes

Reader

W. R.

(2001). Adaptively distributing cognition: A decision-making perspective on human-computer interaction. Behaviour and Information Technology, 20, 339–346.

16.

Richard

Poitrenaud

Tijus

(1993). Problem solving restructuration: Elimination of implicit constraints. Cognitive Science, 17, 497–529.

17.

Slamecka

N. J.

Graf

(1978). The generation effect: Delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4, 592–604.

18.

Wason

P. C.

(1960). On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 129–140.