Archived News

PSE Aids Marine Training at Hi-Tech Marine Facility

Dr. Erica Palmer

The PSE team, lead by scientist Dr. Erica Palmer, has been evaluating the effectiveness of the Infantry Immersion Trainer (IIT) at Southern California's Camp Pendleton since it became operational in late 2007.

The IIT is designed to provide a high fidelity simulation of close quarters combat conditions in urban terrain as well as counterinsurgency training. Adding to the realism of the environment are the sounds and smells of Iraq and pyrotechnics that simulate IED and RPG blasts. Marines and opposition forces use simulated ammunition (called simunitions) in their weapons. Combat injuries can also be simulated by trained role players using Hollywood-style makeup and effects. Several rooms feature digital displays developed under funding from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) that project realistic “avatars” of civilians and insurgents. The avatars respond to being fired upon, and can be controlled to execute a small number of commands (hands above head, drop to knees). In addition to the simulated Iraqi village, the IIT contains a maze designed to allow Marines to practice operating and moving with night vision goggles.

Typical ITT Iraqi Courtyard

In addition to Palmer, the team includes Jason Kobus, Chris Kelsey, Gene Averett, Christine Brown, Geoff Williams, and Brian Dister. The project is funded by ONR as part of its Warfighter Enhancement Program, and is just one part of PSE’s efforts under this program, which have been led by PSE Senior Scientist David Kobus.

PSE Papers presented at HFES Conference

VISUAL EVIDENCE LANDSCAPES: REDUCING BIAS IN COLLABORATIVE INTELLIGENCE ANALYSIS
Cook, M.B., & Smallman, H.S. (2007)

Military trainee analysts worked analysis vignettes with carefully balanced evidence distributions containing 50% pro and 50% con a position. A pervasive confirmation bias was demonstrated in selecting, prioritizing, and deciding about the evidence but when evidence interpretation was visualized graphically in a new evidence landscape visualization vs. in a text list, bias was reduced but not eradicated. A new decision heuristic to conflate evidence importance with evidence degree of support was indicated in the data. Results have implications for the design of systems that help to reduce bias.

In a naturalistic study of Navy weather forecasters we found that forecasters of lower spatial ability put more extraneous meteorological variables in their displays than do forecasters of higher spatial ability. Also, experienced forecasters tend to consult observations before models, and less experienced forecasters show the reverse trend. The results have implications for how to tailor training for complex display use.

A new terrain simplification concept is tested in psychophysical experiment. Participants believe that vision is easy and that they would do a terrain routing task better with a detailed 3-D terrain map. However, smoothing away detail actually improves performance by unmasking gross terrain layout.

Our primary motivation was to compare cognitive vs perceptual secondary task interventions to sustain attention and mitigate the vigilance decrement. We found that cognitive and perceptual interventions improved performance equally; thus, the additional load imposed by a secondary cognitive task did not impair performance. Practically, this finding implies that the appropriate design of a secondary task could mitigate the vigilance decrement and at the same time allow an operator to multi-task during sustained monitoring in an operational environment

Interruptions and situation awareness recovery are important issues in many task domains. Here, we explore the extent to which cognitive design principles for situation awareness recovery that were developed in the air warfare domain can be applied to team mission execution.

Article of the Year Award to PSE and SPAWAR Scientists

PSE scientists, Mark St. John, Harvey Smallman, and Dan Manes, with Bela Feher and Jeff Morrison of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, San Diego, were awarded the Jerome H. Ely Award for Article of the Year in the journal Human Factors, published by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. The award was presented at the society's 50th annual meeting in San Francisco.

Pictured, left to right: Bela Feher, Harvey Smallman, Daniel Manes, and Mark. St. John, with Awards Committee Chair. Thomas Eggemeier (Jeff Morrison not pictured).

Harvey Smallman to Chair Perception and Performance Technical Group

PSE Senior Scientist Harvey Smallman has just been elected Chair-Elect of the Perception and Performance Technical Group (PPTG) of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. Dr. Smallman was elected because of his prominence in applied perception and human factors research. He will serve as PPTG in 2008.

Interruption/Recovery Principles Described in New Manuscript

PSE scientists Mark St. John and Harvey Smallman have written a new manuscript describing a set of empirically validated principles for design of interruption and situation awareness recovery tools.

Multi-tasking and interruptions that disrupt situation awareness are common to many dynamic operational tasks, from monitoring airspaces and plant operations to conducting tactical missions, civil emergency operations, and even fighting wild fires. Recovering situation awareness following an interruption requires detecting and assimilating changes to the situation that occurred during the interruption, yet humans are notoriously poor at detecting changes, and little attention has been given to designing effective situation awareness recovery tools.

PSE scientists, Mark St. John, Harvey Smallman, and Dan Manes, with Bela Feher and Jeff Morrison of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, San Diego, were awarded the prestigious Jerome H. Ely Award for Article of the Year in the journal Human Factors, published by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. The award will be presented at the society's forthcoming annual meeting in San Francisco, October 16-20, 2006. The winning article describes a novel method for helping tactical display operators monitor a dynamic situation. The method consists of two parts: (1) heuristic automation to identify and prioritize objects of high interest, and (2) attention management to help users focus on the objects of interest without losing awareness of the situation. Learn more about Assisted Focus here.

St. John, M., Smallman, H. S., Manes, D. I., Feher, B. A., & Morrison, J. G. (2005). Heuristic automation for decluttering tactical displays. Human Factors, 47, 509-525.

Pacific Science & Engineering Group scientists Nancy Heacox and Holly Handley participated in the Navy Opportunity Forum in June 2006 in Washington D.C. This forum was held to facilitate transition to the fleet of products that were developed through the Navy's Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) program. The venue brought together small businesses, Government personnel and representatives of large Navy contractors.

Drs. Handley and Heacox represented the Integrated Decision Space (I-DecS) tool that was completing the second year of an SBIR sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. I-DecS is a part of the Collaborative and Knowledge Interoperability program.

The I-DecS tool addresses the problem of developing mission plans that include multi-national partners. I-DecS integrates parameters from national culture, organizational structure, and military unit requirements. The user can select tasks and configure the parameters associated with the task, the unit, and the organization in order to complete a plan. The simulation returns predicted values of goodness-of-fit and performance projections, as well as a summary of the mission plan.

The Dr. Arthur E. Bisson Award for Naval Technology Achievement was recently awarded by the Office of Naval Research to Dr. Jeffrey G.Morrison of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, San Diego, for his leadership of a team of scientists and engineers from Pacific Science & Engineering.

Morrison and the PSE team designed, developed, and fleet-tested the TADMUS (Tactical Decision Making Under Stress) and Command 21 programs. A product of the Command 21 program, the Knowledge Web (K-Web) became an integral tool within the Global Command and Control System and was deployed to the USS Carl Vinson battle group in time to support Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Dr. Morrison continues to work in the field of decision-making as part of the on-going Command 21 project, under which the Knowledge Web was developed.

Situation Awareness Technology Jounal Article

Scientists at PSE and SPAWAR System Center, San Diego have published an article in the new Fall issue of Human Factors that describes an intelligent situation awareness tool for helping operators focus on critical information during complex monitoring tasks.

Lead author Dr. Mark St. John says, "We have developed a concept called Assisted Focus that intelligently augments human attention by reducing clutter and helping users focus on critical information.

In the domain of naval air warfare, this concept has required research into three related fields: 1) Algorithms for identifying high and low threat aircraft, 2) methods for directing users' attention toward high threats without reducing overall situation awareness, and 3) the design of human-automation interfaces to help users supervise and interact with realistically imperfect automated systems with sophistication and efficiency.

During a realistic simulation of a naval air warfare task, Assisted Focus improved response timeliness to threatening aircraft 25%, and 93% of the expert warfighters tested preferred the Assisted Focus display."

View or download the article in PDF format

Read more on the PSE website

AUGMENTED COGNITION - From Concept to Fruition

Kobus

Brown

Written by PSE scientists David A. Kobus and Christine M. Brown, this article highlights many of the ways AugCog integrates the methods, theories, and ideas of a variety of scientific areas such as: communication science, psychology, engineering, neurosciences, and computer science to enhance the exchange and use of information between humans and machines.

Some of the topics the authors explore include: "The Techinical Integration Experiment (TIE) - Measuring Cognitive State," "Closed-loop Validation Experiment - Demonstrating the Possible," "Operational Experiments - Demonstrating the Feasible," and "The Future of Augmented Cognition."

View or download the article in PDF format

PSE Papers presented at HFES Convention

PSE scientists Harvey S. Smallman, Mark St. John, Nancy Heacox, and Holly Handley were among the presenters at the 49th Annual Human Factors and Ergonomics Society convention in Orlando, Florida.

You can view or download copies of the papers in PDF format below.

OVERARCHING PRINCIPLES OF DISPLAY DESIGN , Harvey S. Smallman

NAÏVE REALISM: LIMITS OF REALISM AS A DISPLAY PRINCIPLE, Harvey S. Smallman & Mark St. John

SEPARATE SIDES OF THE SAME COIN: ORGANIZATION DESIGN AND (GOOD) DESIGN OF A DECISION SUPPORT TOOL, Nancy J. Heacox & Holly A.H. Handley

RECOVERY FROM INTERRUPTIONS TO A DYNAMIC MONITORING TASK: THE BEGUILING UTILITY OF INSTANT REPLAY, Mark St. John, Harvey S. Smallman, & Daniel I. Manes

JPEN is an integrated force protection information sharing system that provides near real time and improved Antiterrorism / Force Protection (AT/FP) situational awareness at military installations across the United States.

The award will be presented October 11 during a black-tie event at the Hilton Washington and Towers in Washington, D.C. The JPEN project was one of only eleven recognized out of a field of 132.

PSE scientist Heather Oonk headed up the PSE JPEN team.

Research by PSE scientists Harvey S. Smallman and Mark St. John shows that our own understanding of our visual perception of the world is flawed and simplistic, leading to displays that, while supposedly intuitive, lead to poor performance.

Misconceptions: Seeing is easy, accurate, complete

Says St. John, "Display designers feel the more realistic a scene, the easier, and more accurately, we can interpret it. But basic perceptual science tells us that this is really a 'folk theory,' that is based on several misconceptions."

Real-time 3D is a marketing pitch aimed squarely at our Naïve Realism

Smallman continues, "These misconceptions are reinforced by HF display principles that emphasize realism and by technological advances that increasingly support realism. Users and designers are locked in an unhealthy conspiracy, of which neither party is guilty or conscious, to create increasingly realistic, real-time displays that beguile but under-perform."

The Multi-Mission Manager (M3) is designed to facilitate information exchange and management by Expeditionary Strike Group (ESG) staff. In addition to installing and training the tool, Mr. Butz conducted many interviews. Senior ESG staff members felt that the M3 tool, in combination with business rules dictating how and where information is stored, can be a powerful combination for automatically generating briefing material.

The Multi-Mission Manager has many outstanding innovations including: adapting to various user-defined configurations, using existing information from multiple sources, being able to be customized for all ESG staff, top to bottom.

Work continues on the M3 project under the supervision of PSE Principal Investigator Ron Moore.

David Kobus Receives Award

Navy Commander Dylan Schmorrow presented the "COGGIE" to Kobus before a packed ballroom audience at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas during the 2005 International HCI Conference.

The award recognizes individuals whose superior performance and contributions contribute to the success of the Augmented Cognition program.