Human Cognitive Biases and Heuristics in Image Analysis
Mary E. Fendley · CORE Scholar (Wright State University) · 2009
Human Cognitive Biases and Heuristics in Image Analysis.Humans often employ cognitive heuristic principles when making decisions.These cognitive heuristic principles allow the human to simplify the decision making task, and can, by their very nature, lead to deviations, referred to as cognitive biases, which influence the quality of the decisions.While the role of heuristics and biases have been studied in judgmental decision making tasks, very little research on cognitive heuristics and biases has been done on decision making in complex, dynamic tasks.The research undertaken and discussed herein investigates the existence and impact of cognitive biases in time-critical decision making.To do so, this research uses the target identification task undertaken by military image analysts.This research had three goals.The first goal was to identify the search strategies commonly employed in the object identification task.The second was to identify heuristics and biases that occur during this complex reasoning task.The third goal was to develop a decision support system that improves decision making performance by successfully mitigating the biases that arise during time-critical decision making.To achieve these goals three experiments were conducted.The first, a preliminary study, was done to verify the potential existence of biases in the object identification task.Once the preliminary study indicated the potential existence of biases, a second study was undertaken to identify which specific biases were present.The iii