Context as a Cognitive Process: An Integrative Framework for Supporting Decision Making

Multiple lines of research in cognitive science have brought insight on the role that internal (cognitive) representations of situational context play in framing decision making and in differentiating expert versus novice decision performance. However, no single framework has emerged to integrate these lines of research, particularly the views from narrative reasoning research and those from situation awareness and recognition-primed decision research. The integrative framework presented here focuses on the cognitive processes involved in developing and maintaining context understanding, rather than on the content of the context representation at any given moment. The Narratively-Integrated Multilevel (NIM) framework views context development as an on-going and selforganizing process in which a set of knowledge elements, rooted in individual experience and expertise, construct and maintain a declarative, hierarchical representation of the situational context. The context representation that arises from this process is then shown to be the central point of both situational interpretation and decision-making processes at multiple levels, from achieving specific local goals to pursuing broad motives in a domain or theater of action. Keywords— situational awareness; recognition-primed decision making; narrative reasoning; self-organizing architecture; decision