ATTENTION DISTRIBUTION AND DECISION-MAKING IN TACTICAL AIR COMBAT

Tactical decision making in the air combat environment requires the ra pid processing of large amounts of data in a complex and unpredictable environment. To investigate decision making in this domain, we conduc ted a study in which 10 experienced fighter pilots provided tactical d ecisions and performed a target replacement task on a tactical situati on display showing a wide variety of tactical situations based on the de Groot memory paradigm. Results were analyzed to determine features related to pilot attention distribution in processing tactical situati on displays and their correspondence to tactical decision making. Evid ence is provided for the effect of target quantity, target location, a nd overall target density distribution on decision making and attentio n. In addition, substantial variation in decision making was found bet ween participants. Systematic biases in attention were also discovered which have implications for decision making in combat situations. Evi dence of chunking in processing the displays was also explored. Result s indicate that although pilots appeared to chunk targets in a manner similar to experts studied in other fields, the criterion used for det ermining chunking in these studies may not be valid.