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.
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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.
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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
Artifact
World
Agent
Field of
Practice
Affordances
Strategies
Demands
Factors with artifacts and information representations:
Mapping to domain goal-means structure
Visual Form
Directability / Gulf of execution
Observability / Gulf of evaluation
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4. An example
Part 1:
Look at the following list of numbers:
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.
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5. Example (cont.)
Now let’s do this again, but looking at the following arrangement of the numbers: 8 1 6 3 5 7 4 9 2
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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 …
Artifact
World
Agent
Field of
Practice
Affordances
Strategies
Demands
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