The Need for Command and Control Instant Message Adaptive Interfaces: Lessons Learned from Tactical Tomahawk Human-in-the-Loop Simulations

By M. Cummings. 2004

97 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the recent development of a human-in-the-loop simulation test bed designed to examine human performance issues for supervisory control of the Navy's new Tactical Tomahawk missile, measurements of operator situation awareness (SA) and workload through secondary tasking were taken through an embedded instant messaging program. Instant message interfaces (otherwise known as "chat"), already a means of communication between Navy ships, allow researchers to query users in real-time in a natural, ecologic setting, and thus provide more realistic and unobtrusive measurements. However, in the course of this testing, results revealed that some subjects fixated on the real-time instant messaging secondary task instead of the primary task of missile control, leading to the overall degradation of mission performance as well as a loss of SA. While this research effort was the first to quantify command and control performance degradation as a result of instant messaging, the military has recognized that in its network centric warfare quest, instant messaging is a critical informal communication tool, but has associated problems. Recently, a military spokesman said that managing chat in current military operations was sometimes a "nightmare," because military personnel have difficulty in handling large amounts of information through chat, and then synthesizing knowledge from this information. This research highlights the need for further investigation of the role of instant messaging interfaces both on task performance and situation awareness, and how the associated problems could be ameliorated through adaptive display design.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Social Psychology

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Aerospace Engineering

1. Helen Wright Hastie
2. Pedro Patrón

In Social Psychology

1. David A. Robb
2. Atanas Laskov
3. Javier Chiyah-Garcia
4. Helen Wright Hastie
5. Pedro Patrón
6. Xingkun Liu

Citations in the corpus

• MIRIAM: a multimodal chat-based interface for autonomous systems (2017, background): “Other contextual information could also be taken into account such as the cognitive load of the user for intelligent alerting [1].”
• Can students really multitask? An experimental study of instant messaging while reading (2010, background): “In one example of the difficulties that can result, when sailors on the Navy’s Tomahawk missile control received IM messages from researchers, their involvement in the IM process interfered with their ability to respond quickly and accurately to commands to redirect the missiles (Cummings, 2004).”
• Trust triggers for multimodal command and control interfaces (2017, background): “Previous studies have investigated the effect on cognitive load for a similar multimodal C2 interface [1].”