ABSTRACT
Temporal awareness is key to dynamic decision making (DDM) in a wide range of complex situations in safety-critical environments. Yet little is known about the effectiveness of temporal support when making critical time-based decisions. In the present study, we examine whether a decision support system (DSS) that provides an external time-based representation of the current situation and its evolution can promote temporal awareness in a C2 context. In a functional simulation of naval anti-air warfare, a baseline condition was compared to a condition in which a temporal overview display (TOD) taking the form of a scheduling aid was integrated to the original interface. The TOD was associated with an increased situation awareness level and higher concordance to a time-based decision heuristic relative to a distance-based heuristic, suggesting that the tool was successful in promoting temporal awareness. Still, performance impairment related to a higher 190propensity to miss critical changes to the situation was found in the TOD condition, possibly attributable to the need to process an additional display in the interface. Whereas these findings provide encouraging support for the benefit of explicit temporal representation in the effective processing of time-based information, they also call for more holistic evaluations of the cognitive impacts of DSS on DDM.
