Objective To investigate how people’s sequential adjustments to their position are impacted by the source of the information. Background There is an extensive body of research on how the order in which new information is received affects people’s final views and decisions as well as research on how they adjust their views in light of new information. Method Seventy college-aged students, 60% of whom were women, completed one of eight different randomly distributed booklets prepared to create the eight different between-subjects treatment conditions created by crossing the two levels of information source with the four level of order conditions. Based on the information provided, participants estimated the probability of an attack, the dependent measure. Results Confirming information from an expert intelligence officer significantly increased the attack probability from the initial position more than confirming information from a longtime friend. Conversely, disconfirming information from a longtime friend decreased the attack probability significantly more than the same information from an intelligence officer. Conclusion It was confirmed that confirming and disconfirming evidence were differentially affected depending on information source, either an expert or a close friend. The difference appears to be due to the existence of two kinds of trust: cognitive-based imbued to an expert and affective-based imbued to a close friend. Application Purveyors of information need to understand that it is not only the content of a message that counts but that other forces are at work such as the order in which information is received and characteristics of the information source.

This study examines how the framing of educational information affects changes in health-related knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Patients with diabetes viewed either a gain- or a loss-framed informational video about proper foot care and its importance for the prevention of health-threatening problems. The gain-framed messages sustained long-term positive behavioral change. Regression analyses showed that changes in attitudes were predicted by changes in knowledge and that both framing and attitudes were predictors of long-term behavior. This study is important for nurses and certified diabetes educators in that it demonstrates that gain-framed messages are effective in sustaining health-promoting behavior.

Success often depends on how information is passed from person to person, actions are coordinated, attention is directed to an outside object or event, or ideas are collectively generated. Communication—the process of human-to-human information exchange and transfer through a medium (e.g., face-to-face conversation, e-mail, hand signals)—is the glue that allows teams in diverse work environments to coordinate their actions and act collectively to complete complex tasks. And, increasingly, it is a source of data to be used to help instructors, analysts, and researchers to investigate and understand how a work team is performing. In this paper, some current research that seeks to harness communication data and explore the relevance to the railroad industry is described.

: The Maritime Operations Center (MOC) was designed to effectively utilize the planning elements of Future Operations (FOPS) to provide more rapid, accurate resource allocations consistent with the vision of the Commander. MOC staff simultaneously participate in the planning effort, while executing the current operation, and supporting headquarters during planning and execution. Frequently, an operational planning team (OPT) - a task-organized team formed to conduct integrated planning for a specific mission - is formed by the MOC because it offers the advantage of a focused group of subject matter experts approaching the problem in an integrated manner. However, performance problems may be realized with the OPT being isolated in situations that require the OPT to coordinate closely with the rest of the MOC. An experiment was conducted in which the MOC planned with either an integrated or an isolated planning team where the (1) FOPS team was supported by a decision aid/ planning tool that fosters coordination or (2) FOPS team used a planning tool with a reduced coordination capability. In line with the theme of this year's symposium - The Evolution of C2 - this paper describes an experiment conducted to gain insight into advantages and disadvantages associated with forming an OPT.

The sequential revision of beliefs gives rise to a phenomenon referred to as the order effect due to two heuristics, anchoring and adjustment and contrast and inertia, as decision makers strive to incorporate confirming and disconfirming evidence. We hypothesized that the sources of new information would impact the order-effect. Results showed that confirming information from intelligence officers (experts) had a stronger effect on belief adjustment than information from a trusted friend, whereas disconfirming information from a trustworthy friend had a stronger impact than information from intelligence officers. A rationale for the differential effect of information source is discussed.

: Maritime Headquarters with Maritime Operations Centers, or more specifically the MOC, (MOC) represents the nexus of Joint and Navy transformation initiatives, lessons learned in the Global War on Terrorism, and progress toward the Sea Power 21 vision. Developing effective globally networked MOCs will require continued development, refinement and acquisition to deliver nearterm enhancement to Navy warfighting capabilities, while transforming the future maritime force to fulfill its role in The Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower. While much is known about MOC employment, more must be learned to achieve its full operational potential. A comprehensive campaign of experimentation is being designed to test the full MOC capability across the entire range of military operations including engagement with joint, interagency and multinational partners. The Adaptive Architectures for Command and Control research program can contribute to this experimentation campaign. In line with the theme of this year's symposium -- C2 and agility -- this paper describes an experiment conducted to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of two different MOC organizational structures in conducting a mission planning activity that requires use of scarce intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance resources.

: The U.S. Navy is developing new maritime strategies and command structures to guide transformation efforts, to ensure the security of the global maritime commons in the new network-centric era, and to fit the challenges of the 21st century. The addition of an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) commander is one such innovative structural innovation that is under consideration. To empirically investigate different conceptualizations of ISR officers, we contrasted an ISR officer who coordinated--but did not own--ISR assets with an officer that coordinated--and owned--all ISR assets under low and high intensity mission conditions. Four teams comprised of three active duty officers were assigned to coordination or command ISR conditions and participated in two 90 minute experimental sessions using the Distributed Dynamic Decision-making simulator. The findings show that when task intensity was high the percentage of tasks correctly processed was higher when the ISR officer was a commander than a coordinator. We also found attack accuracy to be higher and action latency lower when mission intensity was high and the ISR officer was a commander. Implications for command and control organizations are discussed.

Recent efforts to enhance team performance have been grounded in analysis of team cognition, shared mental models, communication, and teamwork skills. However, alternative lines of work in social psychology and organizational development have addressed “psychosocial” factors, e.g., team cohesion, human relations training and transformational leadership. The goal of this panel is to explore the relevance of these factors for improving team performance. Panelists will describe research advances from laboratory and operational environments (military, space, and medicine), including tools for assessing team cohesion, psychosocial training strategies, analytical methods for examining changes in team performance, and limits to psychosocial approaches.

Useful task managers that can effectively monitor, prioritize, and distribute tasks to our warfighters are being sought. A critical need for the creation of task managers is an understanding of the conditions that lead to successful multi-tasking. The present study is an initial empirical step at increasing this understanding within the environment of a Command and Control (C2) Dynamic Targeting Cell (DTC). We examined operator performance and workload for participants deploying assets to attack enemy targets and their ability to concurrently monitor auditory or visual communications in three conditions of time-pressure (low, medium, and high). Results showed a significant impact in high time-pressure conditions, especially when operators had to process multiple sources of information from the same modality. These findings are a critical step as to understanding multi-tasking performance in C2 environments in general and with regard to communication and spatial monitoring tasks in particular.

Simulation technologies are gaining widespread acceptance across a variety of educational domains and applications. The current research examines whether basic nursing procedure training with high-fidelity versus low-fidelity mannequins results in differential skill acquisition and perceptions of simulator utility. Fifty-two first-year students were taught nasogastric tube and indwelling urinary catheter insertion in one of two ways. The first group learned nasogastric tube and urinary catheter insertion using high-fidelity and low-fidelity mannequins, respectively, and the second group learned nasogastric tube and urinary catheter insertion using low-fidelity and high-fidelity mannequins, respectively. The dependent measures included student performance on nasogastric tube and urinary catheter insertion testing, as measured by observer-based instruments, and self-report questionnaires probing student attitudes about the use of simulation in nursing education. Results demonstrated higher performance with high-fidelity than with low-fidelity mannequin training. In response to a self-report posttraining questionnaire, participants expressed a more positive attitude toward the high-fidelity mannequin, especially regarding its responsiveness and realism.

: This paper describes the design of an experiment that combines research of the Adaptive Architectures for Command and Control (A2C2) and the Command 21 programs, both sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. The experiment focuses on the nexus of organizational design and information presentation strategies - both of which are undergoing dramatic changes in form and function within the US military. The formation of Expeditionary Strike Groups (ESGs) is one example of the transformational vision provided in the Naval Operating Concept wherein an ESG provides a flexible force package, capable of tailoring itself to a wide variety of mission sets. In this effort, the objective is to examine experimentally how ESGs with alternative structures and processes - here specifically related to the incorporation of an ISR officer and different information presentation strategies - affects performance and information flow in an information rich planning and execution environment. We present the process used to develop the scenario environment in which the team-in-the-loop simulation experiment is conducted. This scenario reflects the new mission areas faced by ESGs that include Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief (HA/DR), Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) and Maritime Security Operations (MSO).

Simulation-based training is a promising instructional approach for training military and civilian first responders. In addition to training in relevant taskwork skills, there is increasing need for first responder training in cognitively-based skills such as situation assessment and decision making. The First Responder Simulation Training (FIRST) program trains cognitive skills using complex and degraded situations. The program is comprised of five detailed scenarios, evaluation instruments, debriefing guidelines for each scenario, a multimedia tutorial that explains how to use the evaluation and debriefing instruments, and a detailed scenario guide for administering the scenarios. We conducted an evaluation of the FIRST program to assess its training utility and usability. The program was well-received by both instructors and participants. Instructors noted the importance of training cognitive skills and found the instructor materials valuable for teaching them how to administer a simulation-based training program. Participants found the scenarios realistic and challenging, and noted that such simulation-based training would be a valuable supplement to medic curricula.

This paper is Part II of a 2-paper submission. Part I discusses the automated network identification model and focuses on the problem setup and provide the description of the computational algorithms at the core of the technology system called NetSTAR. In Part II we describe how our identification of adversarial organizations stem from our analysis of command and control (C 2 ) organizations and our analysis of what a model/algorithm must accomplish to identify and describe an adversarial organization. We then summarize the human lab experimentation and concomitant comparison of the accuracy of adversarial organization discovery obtained by a team of human analysts versus the automated C 2 identification process. Briefly, the findings show that the unaided human can perform organization identification at level far better than chance however the NetSTAR system is 100% better than the humans at this task. When the humans attempt to describe and map attributes of the identified organization they faired poorly, however the NetSTAR system showed little diminution in performance even under noise level (amount of error present) that severely decreased human’s performance. The implications of these findings are addressed in this paper.

This paper describes a planned experiment based on the combined research of the Adaptive Architectures for Command and Control (A2C2) and the Command-21 programs, both of which are sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. In line with the theme of this year’s symposium, “Adapting C2 to the 21 Century,” in this research we focus on the nexus of organizational design and information presentation strategies — both of which are undergoing dramatic changes in form and function within the US military. The formation of Expeditionary Strike Groups (ESGs) provides one example of the transformational vision provided in the Naval Operating Concept where Strike Groups offer the potential to revolutionize naval warfare in the littoral region. The ESG provides a flexible force package, capable of tailoring itself to accomplish a wide variety of mission sets. In this effort, we seek to explore how ESGs with alternative structures and processes, in this case specifically related to incorporation of an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) officer and different information presentation strategies, can affect performance and information flow in an information rich planning and execution environment.

A network-centric oriented technology that fused the User Defined Operational Picture (UDOP) and the Lightweight Collaborative Whiteboard (LCW) was compared to the baseline Global Command and Control System (GCCS). The UDOP environment allows the user to personally tailor the dynamic map and collaborate on the map via drawing, marking, and annotation that instantly appears on all other team member's maps. The GCCS map provides none of these capabilities. It was hypothesized that the UDOP environment will foster higher situational awareness and more adequate shared mental models than GCCS. Given that quality shared mental models and situational awareness have been associated with higher performance it was hypothesized that the UDOP environment would produce higher situational awareness and performance than the GCCS environment. Findings supported these hypotheses; higher situational awareness and performance were associated with the UDOP environment.

Immersive virtual simulations offer an opportunity to gain insight and experience in new, innovative organizational structures. Assessing the performance of these new organizations represents a considerable challenge due to the myriad of complex interrelated factors that may contribute to the outcomes observed in the simulation. Theories and models, often in the form of constructive simulations of organizational performance, can guide the development of empirical performance measures by linking detailed behaviors to overall outcomes for organizations. Constructive simulations can be used to create meaningful test conditions for immersive performance measurement, to identify those aspects of performance that are most critical to measure, and to predict the effects of organizational structures on performance. Translating theoretical measures into a form that can guide empirical data collection is a considerable challenge, however. This chapter provides examples of the use of theories and constructive simulations to structure empirical data collection for organizational performance, and discusses the lessons learned from these efforts. The focus is on organizational structures for military command and control, including innovative structures associated with the new and rapidly evolving concept of network-centric warfare.

Network-centered Command and Control (C2) has great potential to increase military effectiveness, in some measure due to enhanced information sharing and dissemination techniques. However, for these technologies to be maximally effective, C2 organizations need to have the flexibility to tailor their organizational structures in response to changing mission conditions. In the experiment reported here, a model-based approach to supporting organizational adaptation was assessed. The purpose of this experiment was to explore ways in which obstacles to adaptation could be overcome. Teams of Naval Officers participated in three simulations of a joint forces mission on the Distributed Dynamic Decision-making (DDD) simulator (Serfaty & Kleinman, 1985; Kleinman & Serfaty, 1989). The match between organizational structure and mission task requirements was manipulated within-participants, resulting in differences in coordination requirements. Between the second and third simulated missions, participant teams were given the opportunity to select an organizational structure from a list of model-based, predefined organizational designs, to better accommodate the changing mission requirements. To support organizational change, model-based prospective information was provided to the teams. This support led to the adoption of better matched congruent organizations in each of the participant teams. Several measurement techniques were designed to evaluate both the degree of adaptation and its effect on mission performance.