Cognitive Engineering

1
Cognitive Engineering

• An interdisciplinary approach to the development
  of principles, methods, tools, and techniques to
  guide the design of computerized systems intended
  to support human performance.

2
User-centered design

• The questions that drive design include the
  following
• What are the goals and constraints in the
  application domain?
• What range of tasks do domain practitioners
  perform?
• What strategies do they use to perform these
  tasks today?
• What factors contribute to task complexity?
• What tools can be provided to facilitate the work
  of domain practitioners and achieve their goals
  more effectively?

from Roth, E. M., Patterson, E. S., Mumaw, R.
J. Cognitive Engineering Issues in User-Centered
System Design. In J.J. Marciniak, Ed. Encylopedia
of Software Engineering (2nd Edition). NY John
Wiley and Sons.
3
the cognitive systems triad

• Factors with human and machine agents
• Human Information Processing
• Perceptual characteristics
• Memory and attention characteristics
• Basis for skill and expertise
• Sources of error
• Communication and coordination
• Human-Human
• Human-Intelligent system

• Factors in the external world/task domain
• Goal-means structure
• Complexity of task elements
• Hazards
• Constraints on actions
• Temporal dynamics
• Coupling between systems
• Uncertainty and risk

• Factors with artifacts and information
  representations
• Mapping to domain goal-means structure
• Visual Form
• Directability / Gulf of execution
• Observability / Gulf of evaluation

4
An example

• Part 1
• Look at the following list of numbers
• 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
• You and your partner take turns selecting a
  number.
• Once a number is selected it cannot be chosen
  again.
• The first one to get any 3 numbers that total 15
  wins.

5
Example (cont.)

• Now lets do this again, but looking at the
  following arrangement of the numbers

8 1 6
3 5 7
4 9 2
6
Modeling this with the cognitive triad

• In the space below, identify the specific factors
  of the agent, artifact, and world that affected
  the performance on this task