We have developed a collaborative team board game, Intellection, which provides group decision making and path planning instruction in a more engaging manner than traditional lecture-based methods. This game furthermore has been effectively leveraged as a research tool to understand the cognitive processes that underlie path planning and adaptive sequential decisions. Our applied motivation derives from intelligence gathering operations that require signals, images, full motion video, and ground radar information to be gleaned from particular areas of interest using a variety of platforms and sensors. Individuals who manage these collections operations must plan initial collection paths, and must further adapt those paths based on emerging requirements, additional opportunities to collect important information, and disasters that could compromise data collection. However, there are typically more targets of interest than there are resources to collect them, demanding individuals to assess the tradeoffs of taking a particular course of action over another. Furthermore, different individuals on a team may be responsible for different types of collection, all of which must be cross-coordinated. Teaching this skillset can be difficult, particularly when team members are geographically separated and team communication is limited and distributed. Intellection provides an engaging tool for developing these critical skills for in-person teams. For distributed teams, we are developing a software version to provide a common visual interface for these teams to work on these skills. We present the initial research, development, refinement, and deployment of Intellection, as well as the results of our initial pilot work tested on multiple groups of novice and expert collections analysts. The framework developed for the Intellection game can be further customized to collect information on individual and group cognition within a variety of Department of Defense pertinent problems spaces. It also serves effectively as a research tool for optimizing operations and group decision-making processes.
Human Performance Analysis and Engineering
Intellection: A Game for Intelligence Collection Planning and Group Decision-Making Optimization
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