Expressing the contextualization process in decision making and decision support

International audienceDecision makers face a very large number of heterogeneous contextual cues; some of these pieces are always relevant (time period, unpredicted event, etc.), but others are only used in some cases (an accompanying person in the car, etc.). Actors then must deal with a set of heterogeneous and incomplete information on the problem-solving state to make their decisions. As a consequence, a variety of strategies are observed, including those involving an actor to another one, but also for the same actor according to the moment. It is not obvious how to get a comprehensive view of the mental representations at work in a person’s brain during many human tasks, and the argumentation rather than the explicit decision proposal is crucial (Forslund, 1995): It is better to store advantages and disadvantages rather than the final decisions for representing decision making