Decision support for air warfare: Detection of deceptive threats

This article describes an empirical study of the effectiveness of a decision support system called TADMUS. TADMUS is an acronym for Tactical Decision-Making Under Stress. The TADMUS DSS was developed at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego. The TADMUS HCI was designed to mitigate the limitations of human cognition in the following 3 areas: perception, attention, and memory. We expected that decision makers would be better able to recognize deceptive threats if they used a compensatory decision aid that mitigated the effects of their cognitive limitations. Our participants were 90 US Navy officers who were enrolled at the Surface Warfare Officer's School. The participants were formed into 15 teams of six to perform the experimental task. Each team performed a total of three 25-minute threat detection scenarios. Eight of the teams had the aid of the TADMUS DSS, and 7 teams used the current US Navy training system called TASWIT. Teams performed significantly better at detection of deceptive threats when using the TADMUS DSS. We concluded that the design approach was successful.