| The study began with the assumptions that military personnel are required to make decisions under uncertainty, that uncertainty is inherently stressful and that stress can negatively impact cognitive components, specifically working memory. As a consequence, in supporting military decision-making, it is important to examine how those cognitive components are related to established models of decision-making. Orientation, the hub upon which Boyd's Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action (OODA) Loop rotates (Richards, 2012), is enabled by working memory, and as such the OODA Loop provides a framework to examine the association between intolerance of ambiguity (IA) and of uncertainty (IU) and working memory capacity (WMC). The inability to tolerate different forms of distress, specifically intolerance of ambiguity and intolerance of uncertainty may predispose individuals to stressful reactions to uncertainty and therefore degrade working memory. Since the cognitive component of primary interest was working memory, the experiments examined the relationship between IA and IU and working memory over time. The mechanism by which that was accomplished was the introduction of ambiguous stimuli to the Operation Span (OSpan) task, resulting in a variant called the OSpan(A). This measure was used first with the military cohort as a part of a broader study on the cognitive neuroscience of resilience and again with the undergraduate cohort with a narrower focus. The main findings were that IA and IU are highly correlated; IA and IU are related to the preservation of WMC to a limited degree, although there are no consistently strong relationships; and that recall of ambiguous stimuli is a reliable predictor of WMC preservation. Additional research is required to validate the cognitive aspects of the OODA Loop, to determine whether ambiguous stimuli differentially induce stress in high IU/IA individuals, and if so, to identify how that stress impacts WM. |
