Cognitive Saliency of Features in Cyber-attacker Decision Making

While much is known about how humans make decisions based on the recency, frequency, and similarity of past experiences, much less is known about how humans weigh the contextual features and the impact it has on decisions. The present study uses a novel method of introspecting into a cognitive model of human decision making in an abstract cyber security game to gain insight about the cognitive salience of the features. The results show that cognitive salience can provide valuable evidence about how and why individuals make their decisions. The implications of these results are discussed with regard to theory and application.