An Immersive Approach to Intuitive Information Processing and Decision Making

In recent years, research in the areas of human-computer interaction and cognitive psychology have revealed major shortcomings in software systems designed to support human analysts in processing large volumes of electronic information. In some cases, technologies developed to automatically fuse information have been found to obscure the nuances required for people to adequately make sense of an emerging situation. We instead propose to focus our attention on employing new instrumentation cost-effective technologies to monitor brain activity, eye gaze, and facial expressions in order to detect initial relevance as well as changes in user intent. These observations, interpreted through models of intuition and sensemaking, will enable the proposed system to alter information displays and the human-machine interaction in ways that not only reduce cognitive load but improve decision quality by enabling users to rapidly elaborate, question, evaluate, compare, and reframe their interpretations of data. During Phase I we will devise measures of intuition and pair them with appropriate sensor technologies. We will also demonstrate through limited experiments how these measures can be used to improve the speed and effectiveness of decision making.