WERC’s research focuses on understanding the mechanisms that shape human performance, decision-making, and resilience in complex operational environments. Across multiple domains, the Center integrates behavioral science, neuroscience, engineering, and immersive technologies to produce explanatory insights and practical tools that scale from the laboratory to realistic operational contexts.

Metatheory

Confronting the replication, theory, and generalizability crises by developing mechanistic frameworks that identify the entities, activities, and boundary conditions underlying reliable phenomena. This approach strengthens cumulative theory-building and ensures research findings translate beyond narrow samples to inform military and applied contexts.

This work ensures that research findings remain robust across populations, environments, and mission demands.

Human-Machine Teaming (HMT)

Optimizing trust, situation awareness, workload distribution, decision-making, and coordination in teams with autonomous systems. Methods include extended reality simulations, neurophysiological monitoring, adaptive biofeedback, humanoid, aerial, and quadruped robots, and advanced exoskeletons.

As autonomous systems become integral to military operations, understanding how humans trust, coordinate with, and rely on machines is essential for safe, effective, and adaptive mission execution.

Cognitive Security (CogSec)

Safeguarding decision-making from misinformation and adversarial influence. Studies examine neurocognitive, psycho-behavioral, sociocultural, and eco-temporal sources of susceptibility and message in techno-social systems using extended reality, social media emulators, eye-tracking, and neuroimaging methodologies.

Modern conflict increasingly targets human cognition; strengthening decision-making resilience is critical to countering misinformation, influence operations, and degraded information environments.

Social Processes in Isolated, Confined, and Extreme Environments (SPICE)

Understanding how isolation and confinement, time pressure, and various environmental stressors affect cognition, behavior, emotion, trust, and cohesion. Using immersive simulations, eye tracking, and wearable physiological sensors and mobile neuroimaging technologies, we capture how teams adapt under these demanding conditions.

Many military and space operations occur under sustained stress, isolation, and time pressure, making it essential to understand how teams maintain trust, cohesion, and performance over time.

WERC advances its mission through active research projects spanning metatheory, human–machine teaming, cognitive security, and social processes in isolated, confined, and extreme environments. These projects combine rigorous scientific inquiry with advanced experimentation and emerging technologies, generating both empirical findings and foundational insights that support education, operational readiness, and future force development.

Metatheory Research

Addressing the Credibility Crisis in Science

WERC confronts the replication and validity challenges in the social and behavioral sciences by probing their conceptual, theoretical, and methodological roots. Beyond documenting low replication rates, the center examines why specific constructs fail to yield cumulative knowledge and how statistical practices obscure underlying mechanisms. Through systematic reviews, replication studies, and z-curve analyses, WERC evaluates the strength of existing evidence bases and develops approaches that privilege explanatory depth over surface prediction. Further, it provides the foundation for evidence-based interventions and establishes reproducible protocols and methodologies.

Reliable and reproducible science is essential for building training, tools, and decision-support systems that perform consistently across populations, environments, and mission conditions.

Promoting Holistic Understandings and Solutions to Scientific Problems

To overcome disciplinary silos, WERC employs mechanistic frameworks that integrate insights across neuroscience, psychology, sociology, and engineering. These frameworks enable transdisciplinary models that connect micro-level neural and cognitive processes with meso-level team dynamics and macro-level operational outcomes. By identifying the specific entities and activities that generate observed behaviors, mechanistic accounts clarify how and why phenomena occur, rather than merely describing correlations.

Integrating insights across disciplines enables more complete explanations of complex human behavior, improving the translation of research into real-world operational contexts.

Human-Machine Theory Research

Embedding Ethical Reasoning in Adaptive Learning Moral Agents

Military operations demand ethical decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, risk, and rapidly changing information, where mission success must be continually balanced against principles such as necessity, proportionality, distinction, and humanity. However, current AI systems do not adaptively reason about ethical trade-offs under uncertainty; they either apply fixed rules or optimize single objectives, limiting both their trustworthiness to humans and their operational utility in dynamic missions. This collaboration with Carnegie Mellon, Brown University, University of Southern California, and George Mason University addresses this gap by developing Adaptive Learning Moral Agents (ALMAs) that integrate ethical reasoning into planning and execution for human–machine teams.

Human–machine teams must be able to navigate ethical trade-offs under uncertainty to maintain trust, legitimacy, and effectiveness during dynamic military operations.

Autonomous Agents as Holders and Mediators of Power

Power is a foundational principle in teams, shaping influence, decision-making, and accountability. As autonomous agents become integral to small groups, they introduce new power dynamics that existing human-centered theories cannot fully explain. This project develops a mechanistic theory of machine-mediated power, extending French and Raven’s classic typology to specify how agents exercise legitimate, expert, reward, coercive, and referent power in group settings. By clarifying the causal pathways of machine influence, the work addresses how delegating authority to autonomous systems alters group cohesion, trust, and decision outcomes in high-stakes contexts.

As machines gain influence within teams, understanding how they shape authority, trust, and accountability is critical to preventing unintended consequences in high-stakes decisions.

Biofeedback and Artificial Mentalizing

This project with collaborators at UC Merced investigates how artificially intelligent agents equipped with “mentalizing” capabilities can enhance human–machine teaming by detecting and responding to their partners’ cognitive states. Prior work shows that people often over-rely on AI, reducing their own cognitive effort during challenging tasks. By enabling agents to recognize under-engagement and respond adaptively—through encouragement, feedback, or corrective prompts—this project seeks to improve both human performance and relational trust with autonomous teammates.

Adaptive systems that respond to human cognitive states can sustain engagement, prevent over-reliance on automation, and improve performance in demanding operational tasks.

CogSec Research

Resilient Cognition Across the Information Density Spectrum

In collaboration with the University of Colorado at Boulder, this project addresses the urgent challenge of protecting humans from information-based threats that distort reasoning, bias decision-making, and weaken resilience across both high- and low-density information environments. The team is developing a mechanistic framework that integrates sociology, psychology, and neuroscience to link information density with vulnerabilities in human cognition. This framework is informed by qualitative studies with operators in diverse contexts, ranging from cyber professionals to astronauts and emergency responders, to identify how scarcity, overload, and information distortion shape cognitive security risks.

Strengthening decision-making under conditions of information overload, scarcity, or distortion is essential for maintaining cognitive resilience in modern conflict environments.

SPICE Research

Resilient Cognition Across the Information Density Spectrum

Modern battlefields demand command posts that are lighter, more mobile, and more dispersed, exposing teams to constant stressors such as disrupted networks, electronic attack, and time pressure. These conditions transform how leaders issue orders, how staff coordinate, and how trust in both people and systems is maintained. A parallel concern comes from the U.S. Space Force, where operators managing high-tempo missions face fatigue from long hours, information overload, and sustained vigilance demands. Both contexts highlight how cognitive strain and degraded conditions undermine resilience, decision quality, and mission effectiveness.

Understanding how leaders and teams function under sustained stress informs training and system design that support effective command and coordination in degraded conditions.