The role of integral displays in decision making

A common approach to designing human-computer decision systems is to divide decision tasks between the person and the computer. The success of this approach depends on knowledge of the specific task components and their interactions, information important for allocating tasks to man and machine. Such knowledge is often unavailable for complex, realistic decision situations. Also, people are reluctant to relinquish part of their decision-making responsibilities. One way to circumvent these problems is to provide general assistance to the decision maker that is independent of any particular decision situation. We propose to use the computer to reduce the decision maker's cognitive load rather than his task load. Specifically, we hope to show that human decision processes can be aided by displaying decision-relevant information in ways that capitalize on certain characteristics of the human perceputal system.