The cognitive capacities of a human agent are significantly impoverished when operating under severe temporal and emotional stress. Currently, human-machine interaction under these circumstances is being informed by classical cognitive models, which treat the human agent as having a repertoire of undiminished cognitive capacities consisting of semantic, symbolic, and inferential reasoning abilities. Such an approach is unsuited when an agent’s mental capacities are reduced to simple perception-action mechanisms, due to functional decortication, under severe stress. Gibson’s direct perception provides a partial answer to this problem. This paper attempts to provide a more robust answer by putting direct perception under the light of recent advances made in human-machine interaction design and theory, neurosciences and embodied cognition. This resulted in the development of a model for human-machine interaction called Direct Perception-Action Coupling (DPAC). This model can be applied to inform the design of critical human-machine interactions that need to be flawlessly performed, often times under stress, to prevent catastrophic outcomes.
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