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Abstract

Cognitive engineering has grown from the need to better understand human-centered design of information-intensive systems such as new generation aircraft cockpits. Objects have affordances whether they are natural or artificial (artifacts). The analysis of the concept of affordance leads to a functional view of human cognition. Cognitive functions that are useful for the use of artifacts are defined along with three attributes: a role, a context of validity, and a set of resources. Cognitive function allocation among human and machine agents is a key issue that leads to the definition of co-relability of human and machine agents in terms of co-operation, co-adaptation, co-dependency and situation awareness. Such a cognitive function analysis involves new aproaches of human cognition that are more phenomenological than the currently used methods based on cognitivism. This paper initialiwes a debate on these issues.

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A Vision for Cognitive Engineering in the Early Twenty First Century

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