Assessing the Impact of Information Channels on the Understanding of Ground Truth

• Main Author: Worthan, Shannon R.
• Other Authors: Shattuck, Lawrence G.
• Published: Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10945/7433

It is important to understand the impact that the proliferation of information displays has on the warfighters ability to reason about, or make sense of, battlefield information. This research investigates how information sources at a tactical operations center (TOC) workstation affected a battle captains ability to understand and portray ground truth in a simulated battlefield scenario. Twelve active-duty officers with previous battle-captain experience were randomly assigned to one of four groups. Each group was exposed once to each source condition (two or six sources) and tactical scenario. A replicated prenetwork centric warfare (NCW) TOC workstation and modern digitally networked workstation were used for comparison. During each 40- minute battlefield scenario, participants provided situational reports (SITREPs), placed friendly and enemy unit symbols on the battlefield map, and provided perceived mental workload. The results of this research indicate that there is no difference for situational understanding between the modern battle captain workstation (six sources) and the legacy workstation (two sources), when the amount of information from the sources remains the same. Contrary to expectations, perceived mental workload using the two-source workstation is significantly higher than the six-source workstation. Results of this research could have implications for the design of future information system and networked workstations in TOCs.