Visualizing Cognitive Moves for Assessing Information Perception Biases in Decision Making

In decision making a key source of uncertainty is people’s perception of information which is influenced by their attitudes toward risk. Both, perception of information and risk attitude, affect the interpretation of information and hence the choice of suitable courses of action in a variety of contexts ranging from project planning to military operations. Visualization associated with the dynamics of cognitive states of people processing information and making decision is therefore not only important for analysis but has also significant practical applications, in particular in the military command and control domain. In this paper, we focus on a major concept that affect human cognition in this context: reliability of information. We introduce Cognitive Move Diagrams (CMD)—a simple visualization tool— to represent and evaluate the impact of this concept on decision making. We demonstrate through both a hypothetical example and a subject matter expert based experiment that CMD are effective in visualizing, detecting and qualifying human biases.