Selecting and Representing Information Structures for Visual Presentation

The objective of this research was to identify and apply experimental techniques for locating and evaluating data patterns and informational "chunks" which are meaningful to the tactical decisionmaker in this decisionmaking tasks. The identification of meaningful chunks of information is useful in specifying criteria for the development of decision-aiding algorithms that search for, classify, and display information. Two main tasks were used for collecting data about informational chunks; reconstruction and copying. In the reconstruction task an experimental run consisted of a successive number of trails. In each trial the subject first viewed a tactical map scenario for either ten seconds or one minute; then it was removed and he was asked to reconstruct it. In the copying task, the subject was asked to copy the scenario as rapidly and accurately as he could. As the subject reconstructed or copied the unit symbols of each scenario, the experimenter recorded the order and time of symbol placements. Participants were 12 military officers, experts; and 12 students, novices to the battlefield task. Two entirely different criteria were used to partition the reconstructed scenarios into chunks of symbols. These were the interplacement times criterion (IPT), which is based on computing the average placement times for the copying task; and the sequence of tactically related symbols (sequential) derived from a predetermined set of tactically meaningful relations.