Using Cognitive Engineering to Support Information Threat Analysts

Distributed Information Warfare Teams are vulnerable to many problems involving information sharing: inadvertent creation of overload conditions, failure to detect patterns that cross between team members, misinterpretations, and so forth. Many of these difficulties can be addressed by adding more context to messages, but context itself contributes to information overload. Simplistic solutions will not work here. The approach proposed is to identify the cognitive requirements of the entire team. Cognitive engineering methods will be adapted to this objective to provide a perspective on the attention, working memory, long-term memory, and metacognitive aspects of distributed teams. This methodology will be used to study an information Warfare data collection function: information seeking. By studying a specific Information Warfare task in parallel with developing and shaping techniques, we will ensure that the recommended methodology can be responsive to the needs of potential users. The output of the Phase I effort will be a methodology for capturing the cognitive requirements of distributed Information Warfare teams, the reasons for difficulty in achieving these reuqirements, types of errors that are found, and strategies and patterns used by teams that have learned to be skillful