TADMUS Program:  Decision-Making Schemas in Rapidly Changing Situations

Research Sponsored by the Office of Naval Research
Grant No. N00014-93-1-0525
Program Officer: Gerald Malecki

OVERVIEW

The primary objective of this multi-year project was to investigate the schemas used by experts in tactical decision making. The research effort involves detailed cognitive analyses of the knowledge shown by the experts together with explicit computer modeling of their performance as they utilize this knowledge. The project was begun in collaboration with investigators working on ONR’s TADMUS (Tactical Decision Making Under Stress) Program at SPAWAR in San Diego and NAWC-TSD at Orlando.

A second objective was added to the project with the availability of state-of-the-art eye-tracking equipment. CERF currently has two 60-Hz eye-tracking systems that have been used to track the eye movements of officers participating in experiments at SPAWAR in San Diego. CERF also has two 250-Hz systems that are compact and highly portable. They have been used to track eye movements of officers at the Surface Officers Warfare School in Newport, RI, on several occasions throughout 1998-1999.

DURIP:  Integrating DVD Technology with Advances in Eye Tracking

Project funded by the Defense University Instrumentation Research Program (DURIP)
ONR Contract No: N000149810466
Program Officer: Gerald Malecki

OVERVIEW

Our major accomplishment for this instrumentation award has been the seamless integration of our eye tracking technology with the new generation of Digital Video (DV) camcorders and Digital Video Cassette Recorders (DVCR). The new technology allows us to store our video data in a digital format, which is important for several reasons: it eliminates the need to perform an analog to digital conversion that greatly degrades the video quality, it provides us with a way of recording our data into a nonlinear format that is easily accessible and searchable, and it allows us to integrate our digital video data with our eye tracking data. Currently, we have configured a DV system that will allow us to maintain our portability for field experiments and that will still provide us with the data storage capacity necessary for archiving, editing and analyzing data.

HYBRID Program:  Learning in Tactical Decision-Making Situations: A Hybrid Model of Schema Development

Grant Number: N00014-95-1-0237
Period of Activity: October 1, 1996 - September 30, 1997

OVERVIEW

During the period covered by this report, we have focused on two areas: developing a baseline set of measures with which to evaluate subject performance and modeling the learning that takes place as the subject interacts with the experimental task. We have had successful results in both areas. A set of highly complex scenarios were designed and used with a substantial number of novice subjects, yielding valuable information about how subjects learn to carry out this command and control task. The data from this experiment, together with data from several previous experiments carried out as part of this research effort, have been used as input to the cognitive model. The model performs very well thus far, capturing very satisfactorily the performance of the subjects we have chosen to study. We expect to make significant progress on the model during the next six months.

More: Hybrid Program Continued

MURI Program: Understanding and Measuring Cognitive Workload: A Coordinated Multidisciplinary Approach

A collaborative project at George Mason University and San Diego State University

Principal Investigators: Len Adelman (GMU)
Deborah Boehm-Davis (GMU)
Wayne Gray (GMU)
Sandra Marshall (SDSU)
Robert Pozos (SDSU)

Research sponsored by the Department of Defense MURI Program through the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Grant No. F49620-97-1-0353 Program Officer: Willard Larkin

OVERVIEW

This project was funded under the 1997 Multidisciplinary Research Program of the University Research Initiative (MURI) to investigate cognitive workload. It is a collaborative effort carried out by researchers from two universities, George Mason University and San Diego State University and involves the integration of several academic disciplines. The objective is to create new psychophysiological measures of cognitive workload and to develop sophisticated cognitive models that can interpret these measures. Much of the psychophysiological work is being done at SDSU with emphasis on eye-tracking measures of pupil dilation, point of gaze, and blinks (Marshall) and on finger movements and motor responses of force required as individuals use keyboards and joysticks (Pozos). At GMU, initial emphasis has been on developing and evaluating a team task (Adelman) and on creating a cognitive model in ACT-R (Gray & Boehm-Davis). These different research strands yield many possibilities for integration, and over the course of the 3-year project, we anticipate a number of important interdisciplinary results.

This GazeTraceTM shows the gaze position and every eye movement made by a research subject whose task was to count the number of objects in the display. The subject looked at the display for 8 seconds and produced 2000 observations, all of which are reproduced as individual circles in the figure.