Neurally-Driven Adaptive Decision Aids

Warfighters are constantly challenged with increasingly complex mission environments, roles, and tasks, which require rapid and accurate decision making. Most current military and commercial decision aids leverage a single strategy: they retrieve and fuse information about well-defined objects and events for the user. Such aids effectively discourage users from considering contextual information and patterns that may help them recognize or think critically about hostile or innocent events. If a decision aiding system were to be truly effective, its adaptive strategies should be driven by more than manipulation of well-defined information presented to the user. In this paper, we propose several critical factors (1) Information state, (2) User cognitive state, and (3) Interaction state – that will enable for discern what must be decided and by when; discriminate which cognitive state and process are in play; and assess interactions (queries, selections, etc.) with the information. Most importantly, these factors will allow for a decision aid to capitalize on – the distinctly human ability to find meaning in swarm of objects and events being perceived.