Effects of Information Availability on Command-and-Control Decision Making

Objective: We investigated how increases in task-relevant information affect human decision-making performance, situation awareness (SA), and trust in a simulated command-and-control (C2) environment. Background: Increased information is often associated with an improvement of SA and decision-making performance in networked organizations. However, previous research suggests that increasing information without considering the task relevance and the presentation can impair performance. Method: We used a simulated C2 task across two experiments. Experiment 1 varied the information volume provided to individual participants and measured the speed and accuracy of decision making for task performance. Experiment 2 varied information volume and information reliability provided to two participants acting in different roles and assessed decision-making performance, SA, and trust between the paired participants. Results: In both experiments, increased task-relevant information volume did not improve task performance. In Experiment 2, increased task-relevant information volume reduced self-reported SA and trust, and incorrect source reliability information led to poorer task performance and SA. Conclusion: These results indicate that increasing the volume of information, even when it is accurate and task relevant, is not necessarily beneficial to decision-making performance. Moreover, it may even be detrimental to SA and trust among team members. Application: Given the high volume of available and shared information and the safety-critical and time-sensitive nature of many decisions, these results have implications for training and system design in C2 domains. To avoid decrements to SA, interpersonal trust, and decision-making performance, information presentation within C2 systems must reflect human cognitive processing limits and capabilities.