Abstract

A cognitive task analysis (CTA) was used to determine the critical decisions and judgments of landing signal officers (LSOs) who are responsible for guiding in the aircraft who land on the U.S. Navy’s aircraft carriers. Based on this CTA, a decision requirements table was constructed which outlined the critical decisions, the critical cues, any potential errors, why the decision is difficult, degrees of uncertainty, tools currently used, and conflicting goals and objectives. With the information, designs were generated for the LSO displays on the LSO platform of the aircraft carriers. Our approach is referred to as decision-centered design. Decision- centered design adopts the concept of using the critical decisions and judgments of the individuals as the basis for any system or design development with the goal of basing the designs on the decisions, rather than available data, sub-system configurations, or tasks. The recommendations were accepted by LSO instructors and a Phase II effort is underway to further revise the recommendations to encompass additional aircraft types and environmental conditions. This effort will be completed in early 2000.

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