A review of time critical decision making models and human cognitive processes

From a general cognitive perspective, decision making is the process of selecting a choice or course of action from a set of alternatives. A large number of time critical decision making models have been developed over the course of several decades. This paper reviews both the underlying cognitive processes and several decision making models. In the first section, we briefly describe the primary underlying cognitive processes and issues that are common to most, if not all, decision making models, with a focus on attention, working memory, and reasoning. The second section reviews several of the most prominent high-level models of decision making, especially those developed for military contexts