Representing and Analyzing Mental Models

The primary objective of the Phase I research is to determine the feasibility of fast and non-obtrusive methods for representing situation knowledge in a naturalistic battlefield environments. A second key goal is to ground the selected methods firmly in cognitive research on knowledge representation and knowledge elicitation. To achieve these goals, we propose four tasks: (1) cognitive analysis of the application domain, and determination of the types of situation representations, or mental models, that characterize it; (2) development of rapid techniques for matching and assembling elements from the background database into real-time representations that track an individual decision maker's evolving situation understanding; (3) implementation of a prototype computer-based demonstration of the rapid matching and assembly techniques; and (optionally) (4) an experimental test of the validity of the process by which mental models are matched to situations.