An Assessment of Submarine Approach Officer Decision-Making and its Implications for Command Workstation Design

Special Section: Contending with Complexity: Developing and Using a Scaled World in Applied Cognitive Research

“…Data collection using Ned was conducted by a submarine officer as his master's thesis work at the Naval Postgraduate School (Soldow, 1998). The thesis primarily addressed outcome measures as a function of AO expertise and experience.…”

Submarine Information Organization and Prioritization and Submarine Officer of the Deck Experience

“…This involvement of experts could be through empirical assessment during real or simulated operations, but such approaches are expensive and time-consuming, especially when involving many subjects. Alternately, interviews and other consultation with submariners provide insight into their cognitive approach (Kirschenbaum, 1992;Soldow 1998), but often, people do not have conscious access to their own underlying mental organization and cannot articulate rules for their behavior (Ashby & Maddox, 1992, 1993, particularly as seen in a submarine navigation, (Sun, Merrill, & Peterson, 2001). Talk-aloud protocols (i.e., verbalizing while going through actions) can be more revealing than direct interview, but they have limitations as well, especially in combining data across many subjects.…”