Towards Understanding the Commander's Coup d'Oeil. Part 2
Abstract
This is the second paper in a series on what Clausewitz called the commander's "coup d'oeil," the ability to understand the situation on the battlefield at a glance. We employ a standard paradigm from research on expertise in which participants study a scenario and then reproduce it from memory. Last year we reported results consistent with those from other studies on expertise, viz., that experts recall meaningful scenarios better than meaningless scenarios, whereas novices recall both types of scenarios equally badly. This paper reports on four follow-up experiments. The experts were army officers (students and instructors) from the Swedish National Defence College, and the novices were students of political science without military experience at the college. The first two experiments investigated experts' and novices' recall of scenarios under two conditions: (1) the scenario develops violating constraints on how military units should move, and (2) the scenario does not develop violating constraints on how military units should move. This was an attempt to distinguish between two possible explanations for last year's results: the constraints hypothesis and the pattern-recognition hypothesis. The results show that experts perform better than novices, but both groups recall scenarios in which the development did not violate constraints better than scenarios in which the development did violate constraints. We interpret these results as support for the constraints hypothesis. In experiments 2 and 3, we varied the time allowed for experts and novices to inspect static scenarios and compared their interpretations of the scenarios. The results show that a short time for inspection affects the interpretation by novices to a greater extent than it affects the interpretation by experts, as was predicted by Clausewitz. We interpret this to mean that novices and experts achieve their understanding of military scenarios in different ways.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 2011
- Accession Number
- ADA546903
Entities
People
- Berndt Brehmer
- Jan Kuylenstierna
- Joacim Rydmark
- Sten-olof Olsson
Organizations
- Swedish Defence University