Assessing the Impact of Information Channels on the Understanding of Ground Truth
Abstract
It is important to understand the impact that the proliferation of information displays has on the warfighter's ability to reason about, or make sense of, battlefield information. This research investigates how information sources at a tactical operations center (TOC) workstation affected a battle captain's ability to understand and portray ground truth in a simulated battlefield scenario. Twelve active-duty officers with previous battle-captain experience were randomly assigned to one of four groups. Each group was exposed once to each source condition (two or six sources) and tactical scenario. A replicated pre-network centric warfare (NCW) TOC workstation and modern digitally networked workstation were used for comparison. During each 40-minute battlefield scenario, participants provided situational reports (SITREPs), placed friendly and enemy unit symbols on the battlefield map, and provided perceived mental workload. The results of this research indicate that there is no difference in terms of situational understanding between the modern battle captain workstation (six sources) and the legacy workstation (two sources) when the amount of information from the sources remains the same. Contrary to expectations, perceived mental workload using the two-source workstation is significantly higher than the six-source workstation. Results of this research could have implications for the design of future information system and networked workstations in TOCs.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 2012
- Accession Number
- ADA563743
Entities
People
- Shannon R. Worthan
Organizations
- Naval Postgraduate School