Modeling cues for intuitive sensemaking simulations

Abstract

Modern military personnel must not only possess typical warfighting abilities; they must also be able to rapidly perceive, understand, and then respond to a range of ambiguous behavioral, social, and cultural stimuli. In other words, personnel must have sociocultural sensemaking skills - preferably intuitive sensemaking skills that allow them to act with the utmost agility. This paper begins by discussing sensemaking, sociocultural pattern recognition, and expertise-based intuition. It briefly describes training approaches for these constructs, as well as training for the integrated concept. Instructional simulations could facilitate such training. However, for simulations to effectively support this subject matter, they must be able to replicate realistic patterns of life, from the subtle characteristics of human body language to the emergent behaviors of crowds. That is, they must provide accurate, nuanced cues to which the trainees can react. This paper closes by discussing our ongoing work to address this gap by modeling realistic cues in a simulation. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.