Situational Understanding, Workload, and Congruence with the Commander's Mental Model

Abstract

For the U.S. Army future force, it will be particularly important to see first, understand first, and act first. to do this, collaborative planning and execution are necessary. These are enabled, in part, by a shared mental model of the situation. Using a technique established by Entin and Entin (2001), the authors examined the relationship between subjects' discrepancies with the commander's mental model and their ratings of their own frustration, workload, effectiveness, and situational understanding (SU). They found that the greater the subject's discrepancy with the commander's mental model, the higher the participants rated their own frustration, and the lower they rated their own workload, effectiveness, and SU. The findings suggest that those who did not have a mental model similar to the commander's were consequently more frustrated at their jobs, less effective, and had lower SU of the situation. The finding of greater discrepancy being associated with lower workloads was explained to be a result of one not having one's head in the game (high discrepancy with the commander's mental model), or being unable to provide products, information, or actions to the commander (low workload). Correlations between discrepancies in mental model and frustration, workload, SU, and effectiveness were higher during low workload and low SU. Overall, the results suggest a link between shared mental models with the commander and team performance, since performance has been consistently linked to constructs such as workload, self-efficacy, and affect. Results further emphasize the need for validated measures of mental model congruence to assess the effectiveness of changes in doctrine, organization, and materiel anticipated in the future force. Research is needed to delineate critical components of shared understanding and their impact on decision making, and to assist in the development of methods to improve shared mental models.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Feb 01, 2005
Accession Number
ADA430019

Entities

People

  • Bruce S. Sterling
  • Chuck H. Perala

Organizations

  • United States Army Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • C4I
  • Human Systems
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aircrafts
  • Applied Psychology
  • Army Training
  • Cognitive Workload
  • Command And Control
  • Complex Systems
  • Doctrine
  • Frustration
  • Observation
  • Psychology
  • Simulations
  • Situational Awareness
  • Training
  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
  • Unmanned Ground Vehicles
  • Warfare
  • Workload

Fields of Study

  • Psychology

Readers

  • Organizational Psychology.
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.