Cognitive Engineering in the Aviation Domain

Book excerpt: Although cognitive engineering has gained widespread acceptance as one of the most promising approaches to addressing and preventing difficulties with human-machine coordination and collaboration, it still meets with considerable skepticism and resistance in some of the industries that could benefit from its insights and recommendations. The challenge for cognitive engineers is to better understand the reasons underlying these reservations and to overcome them by demonstrating and communicating more effectively their concepts, approaches, and proposed solutions. To contribute to this goal, the current volume presents concrete examples of cognitive engineering research and design. It is an attempt to complement the already existing excellent literature on cognitive engineering in domains other than aviation and to introduce professionals and students in a variety of domains to this rather young discipline. The editors of this book, and the authors whose work is included, subscribe to the need to evaluate work in context. Accepting new paradigms for the study of humans working in complex environments, they view the human as an asset--indeed a necessity--in human-machine systems and they accept and take advantage of variations in human behavior. In addition, they recognize that much or most error is the result of mismatches between human capabilities and the demands placed on those humans by the machines which they use in the environments in which they are placed. As a whole, this volume illustrates how far we've come in understanding the cognitive bases of human work in complex human-machine systems.