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Investigated a visualization aid to support naval search tasks. 20 officers and 20 students completed 12 trials in an experiment that contrasted with and without the visualization aid and controlled for learning effects. The aid improved performance in both groups, and there were no effects of learning or task difficulty.

This paper investigates a display manipulation designed to support movement tasks where the location of a threat is uncertain and dynamic. The problem is analogous to that of a naval transportation task, where a ship has to move from one port to another under threat from several enemies of which only the initial positions are known. The display manipulation visualizes a time-dependent constraint on the area where an enemy can be, given its initial position and maximum speed, and adjusts the shape to the environment. The region outside this area represents a field of safe travel where the transport ship can move safely. Forty participants without prior knowledge of the task completed sixteen trials in an experiment that contrasted with and without visualization, and controlled for learning effects. The results suggest that the visualization significantly improved performance in the movement task and that it had a large effect. The visualization also significantly reduced variance in performance, which suggests that it generated a more consistent behavior among participants. It was also easy for the participants to make effective use of the visualization, and once exposed to the visualization, the learning transferred to a condition without the visualization. This study have practical utility for designers of combat information systems as the results indirectly suggest that people have difficulties in inferring the locations of targets of which they only have fragmentary information. Including similar visualizations in the design may consequently increase overall system performance.

This paper presents an exploratory microworld study with the aim to identify individual dierences between participants, and relate those dierence to how well the participant solves the task. Six ocers, rank from lieutenant commander to flotilla admiral, were studied when they commanded a maritime escort mission. The experiment was conducted using a microworld where the participant had to control all own units while the computer controlled enemy and neutral units. Data collection consisted of think-aloud protocols, screen captures of the microworld’s tactical screen, questionnaires, and battle outcomes. Performance was determined using a measure of mission success and a general model of the participants’ decision making process was constructed. This model was used to identify individual dierences and relate those to task performance. The results suggest that there is no correlation between how often the participants perform a certain decision making activity, and how well they perform in the microworld. On the other hand, the results suggest a strong correlation between how well the participants perform in the microworld and how many dierent decision making activities they visit during one coherent reasoning chain. The result seems to suggest that it is more important to consider many aspects of a problem at the same time, and that no decision making activity is more important that another.

This article presents a display manipulation designed to support search tasks in which the location of the target is unknown and changes over time. The problem is analogous to that of a naval search task when there is an initial sighting and then the naval force must guide its search vehicles to reestablish contact with the fleeing target. The display manipulation visualizes a dynamic constraint on the area where a fleeing target can be found and adjusts its shape to the environment and to the search efforts. Forty participants without prior knowledge of search tactics completed 12 trials in an experiment that compared performance with and without the visualization aid and controlled for learning effects. The results suggest that this visualization improves performance in the dynamic search task. They further suggest that the visualization was easy to learn but that the learning effect did not transfer to a condition without visualization. The results have practical utility for both military and civil search tasks, and they are consistent with other research that emphasizes that control interfaces should make constraints in the task environment perceptually available.