Rashaad E. T. Jones

The Neocities Simulation: Understanding the Design and Experimental Methodology Used to Develop a Team Emergency Management Simulation

This paper describes the continued development of a scaled-world simulation designed to conduct empirical research on team cognition and decision-making within a distributed environment. The NeoCITIES simulation was created to study decision-making and the impact of hidden knowledge profiles on team performance within a distributed command, control, and communications (C3) setting. NeoCITIES has been designed for the purpose of representing both new and operationally relevant scaled worlds, while emulating the complexities and attributes of emergent decision-making scenarios involving emergent counterterrorism events. Because patterns of activity emerge across time, knowledge is often hidden and disconnected within and across teams. NeoCIITES has been orchestrated to assess and evaluate the extent to which teams can socially construct knowledge while ineteracting through various means of technological support. Specifically, NeoCITIES is an interactive computer program designed to display information pertaining to events and occurrences in a virtual city space. The teams in the simulation represent three separate services (e.g., Police, Fire/EMS, and Hazmat) in which they must assess situations, interact and communicate according to their inter-team and intra-team roles, allocate resources in a timely manner, and make decisions within the context of emergency crisis management. Once NeoCITIES development has been completed, the simulation will be used as an experimental task to measure the impact of hidden knowledge profiles on teamwork and decision-making in the distributed team context.

A Distributed Cognition Simulation Involving Homeland Security and Defense: The Development of Neocities

This paper describes a scaled-world simulation developed to conduct empirical research on team cognition, communication, and decision-making within a distributed environment. The NeoCITIES simulation is an advancement of the CITIES task, which was designed to study group decision-making within a command, control, and communications (C3) setting (Wellens & Ergener, 1988). Studying group decision-making is a two-fold problem involving team cognition and team communication. According to McNeese (2003), team cognition is constructed through distributed and emerging activities via several sources. A majority of studies examining distributed decision-making have involved militaristic, battlefield engagement, or urban warfare settings. In that same spirit, NeoCITIES was designed for emergency crisis management teams undergoing terrorist attacks within a college-town. Thus, NeoCITIES is a new and operationally relevant scaled world that emulates the complexities and emergent decision-making attributes resident in a 9/11-type of terrorist scenario. Through the use of NeoCITIES, we anticipate the assessment of a number of cognitive tools to support distributed cognition (e.g., problem-based decomposition) as well as advancing adaptive intelligent interfaces.

Using fuzzy cognitive mapping techniques to model situation awareness for army infantry platoon leaders

This paper describes work on the development of an actionable model of situation awareness for Army infantry platoon leaders using fuzzy cognitive mapping techniques. Developing this model based on the formal representation of the platoon leader provided by the Goal-Directed Task Analysis (GDTA) methodology advances current cognitive models because it provides valuable insight on how to effectively support human cognition within the decision-making process. We describe the modeling design approach and discuss validating the model using the VBS2 simulation environment.

A framework for representing agent and human situation awareness

For this paper, we examine the challenges to the formalization of agent SA in the context of human (or traditional) SA and the value added by agent SA. We hypothesize about how an agent can generate and maintain Level 2 and Level 3 SA and how that should be represented internally for the agent. Additionally, we consider the relationship between the human operator and agent to theorize how agent SA impacts human SA and vice versa, such as situations where agent SA is in conflict of human SA. Our examination leads to a theoretical framework of human SA and agent SA that includes identifying how to establish, maintain, and share SA for both entities. This framework is expected to provide insight on how to operationalize agent SA for current and future systems in dynamic work domains.

Team and Shared Situation Awareness in Disaster Action Teams

Disaster Action Teams assist with American Red Cross disaster relief operations by providing support and services to people who are affected by local emergencies, such as fire or water damage to a home. Ensuring the successful performance of these teams requires promoting not only the situation awareness (SA) of individual team members, but also the SA of the team as a whole as well as their shared SA. In this paper, we demonstrate how the Goal-Directed Task Analysis methodology can be utilized to identify the critical information requirements of Disaster Action Teams, at both the individual and team level. We also illustrate how SA-Oriented Design Principles can be applied to meet their information demands by effectively presenting these information requirements.