Meta-Cognitive Shared Awareness in Collaborative Decision Making

This proposal describes a system to support shared awareness of team functions in net-centric collaborative decision making. Our goal is to enhance team decision making by enabling the team to better coordinate its critical team cognitive processes. These processes, which include information exchange, communication, individual initiatives and supporting behavior, depend heavily on properly shared team mental models. Our proposed system will automatically enable the warfighter team to maintain a common shared mental model as well as a shared representation of situational knowledge. This will enhance collaboration, timely exchange of critical knowledge and integration of the dispersed cognitive capabilities into a superior decision making system. We propose to create a team-aware meta-cognitive information support layer composed of collaboration tools that will facilitate the maintenance of shared mental models of team function. Our approach focuses on the integration of three modeling frameworks that have shown strong promise as a means of enhancing the performance of teams and individuals in decisions making under stress: Adaptive User Models for team-aware automated information selection and distribution, Decision Process Models to provide a framework for team workflow management, and Critical Thinking Models to prompt team critical thinking through the facilitation of critical dialogue.