ACT-R Modeling of Intelligence Analysts’ Perception of Information to Improve Situational Understanding

For the military, one of the central challenges associated with developing good situational understanding originates with the information. The character of today's battlefield features a high volume of information across multiple sources and threatens to overwhelm traditional methods of review.Confounding this effort is the fact that the information received often has varying degrees of agreement (i.e., complementary or contradictory). Timely review requires the development of automated assist methods that identify and prioritize the most valuable and applicable information for mission success. One method to improve military situational awareness and decisionmaking is the ability to amalgamate information across various sources and content. Towards this end, this paper presents the development and evaluation of an Adaptive Control of ThoughtRationale (ACT-R) model to understand the cognitive steps and processes employed by intelligence analysts as they value information.