This symposium addresses the characterization of human decision making within a complex environment for the purpose of developing improved decision support systems. All of the work presented in this symposium was conducted under a Navy research program entitled “Tactical Decision Making Under Stress” (TADMUS). The overall objective of the TADMUS program is to improve tactical decision making of anti-air warfare (AAW) crew members within the Aegis cruiser's combat information center (CIC) under conditions of stress and uncertainty. The unique aspect of this effort is that each presentation addresses decision making behavior, within a single domain, from a different perspective. The goal of each effort is to characterize some aspect of expert decision making performance within the AAW task environment, and to make recommendations for the resulting decision support system design based upon these characterizations. The result is a multi-faceted, human-centered approach to information organization and interface display design for a decision support system.