Assessing Responder Cognitive Performance in Urban Search and Rescue Missions

Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) deal with highly complex environments that at times can be too dangerous for sending human responders to locate and assist victims. Because of this, rescue robots are being utilized (Davids, 2002). Human robotic interface provides relevant information that is essential for the responder to make decisions and complete tasks. The responder's cognitive performance is evaluated to test the effectiveness of the information provided by the human robotic system. Traditionally, cognitive performance evaluation incorporates only the systematic aspect and fails to account for the intuitive aspect. Consequently, these evaluations cannot successfully account for the ideas and conceptualization of the total responder's decision-making experience (Klein, 2008). Neglecting the intuitive aspect of evaluating cognitive performance can lead to incomplete measures, which may result in developing ineffective interface designs that could have catastrophic effects on the strategies and victims. This research addressed these shortcomings by using an integrated framework to evaluate responder cognitive performance. The integrated framework incorporates situational awareness (SA) and intuitive pattern recognition (IPR) to assess cognitive performance in USAR missions. A test bed was developed and used in a case study. Empirical experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of the responder's experience levels and interface designs on the responder's cognitive performance and the difference between the responder's integrated and conventional assessments indicting the integrated framework works. The results indicated the responder's experience and interface design type had significant effects on situation awareness and intuitive pattern recognition performance.