Publications

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Abstract not provided.

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories are integrating qualitative and quantitative methods from anthropology, human factors and cognitive psychology in the study of military and civilian intelligence analyst workflows in the United States’ national security community. Researchers who study human work processes often use qualitative theory and methods, including grounded theory, cognitive work analysis, and ethnography, to generate rich descriptive models of human behavior in context. In contrast, experimental psychologists typically do not receive training in qualitative induction, nor are they likely to practice ethnographic methods in their work, since experimental psychology tends to emphasize generalizability and quantitative hypothesis testing over qualitative description. However, qualitative frameworks and methods from anthropology, sociology, and human factors can play an important role in enhancing the ecological validity of experimental research designs.

Vision is one of the dominant human senses and most human-computer interfaces rely heavily on the capabilities of the human visual system. An enormous amount of effort is devoted to finding ways to visualize information so that humans can understand and make sense of it. By studying how professionals engage in these visual search tasks, we can develop insights into their cognitive processes and the influence of experience on those processes. This can advance our understanding of visual cognition in addition to providing information that can be applied to designing improved data visualizations or training new analysts. In this study, we investigated the role of expertise on performance in a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) target detection task. SAR imagery differs substantially from optical imagery, making it a useful domain for investigating expert-novice differences. The participants in this study included professional SAR imagery analysts, radar engineers with experience working with SAR imagery, and novices who had little or no prior exposure to SAR imagery. Participants from all three groups completed a domain-specific visual search task in which they searched for targets within pairs of SAR images. They also completed a battery of domain-general visual search and cognitive tasks that measured factors such as mental rotation ability, spatial working memory, and useful field of view. The results revealed marked differences between the professional imagery analysts and the other groups, both for the domain-specific task and for some domain-general tasks. These results indicate that experience with visual search in non-optical imagery can influence performance on other domains.

Abstract not provided.