Enhancing change detection of the unexpected in monitoring tasks : guiding visual attention in command and control assessment

Many surveillance tasks in military command and control involve monitoring for change in a visual display environment in order to discover potential hazards or new opportunities. Effective change detection in various situational pictures is a requisite for battlespace understanding. The detection of unexpected events is particularly difficult and missed events may cause malicious outcomes in contexts characterized by high levels of complexity and risk. We present examples of change detection failures in the military domain, and explain why and how the psychological phenomena of change blindness and inattentional blindness can generate such failures. We further give an overview of existing solutions to these problems and point out a specific issue, coping with unexpected events, where effective solutions are missing today. Inadequate expectations may be a result of misdirection by the enemy. This article demonstrates a new concept – an adaptive attention aware system (A3S) for enhanced change detection. The A3S is a concept of gentle support. It is based on cuing of visual attention by a non-obtrusive flash cue in the display (bottom-up), to compensate for guidance by inadequate expectations (top-down) in situations influenced by high levels of uncertainty