The focus of the Integrated Cognitive- Neuroscience Architectures for Understanding Sensemaking (ICArUS) Program is to understand and model how humans engage in the sensemaking process, both during optimal and suboptimal (biased) performance. Of particular interest are cognitive biases related to attention, memory, and decision making.

Sensemaking refers to the remarkable human ability to detect patterns in data, and to infer the underlying causes of those patterns – even when the data are sparse, noisy, and uncertain.