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How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds (1995)
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| Venue: | Cognitive Science |
| Citations: | 379 - 6 self |
BibTeX
@ARTICLE{Hutchins95howa,
author = {Edwin Hutchins},
title = {How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds},
journal = {Cognitive Science},
year = {1995},
volume = {19},
pages = {265--288}
}
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Abstract
Cognitive science normally takes the individual agent as its unit of analysis. In many human endeavors, however, the outcomes of interest are not determined entirely by the information processing properties of individuals. Nor can they be inferred from the properties of the individual agents, alone, no matter how detailed the knowledge of the properties of those individuals may be. In com-mercial aviation, for example, the successful completion of a flight is produced by a system that typically includes two or more pilots interacting with each other and with a suite of technological devices. This article presents a theoretical framework that tokes a distributed, socio-technical system rather than an indi-vidual mind as its primary unit of analysis. This framework is explicitly cognitive in that it is concerned with how information is represented and how representa-tions are transformed and propagated in the performance of tasks. An analysis of a memory task in the cockpit of a commercial airliner shows how the cognitive properties of such distributed systems can differ radically from the cognitive properties of the individuals who inhabit them. Thirty years of research in cognitive psychology and other areas of cognitive science have given us powerful models of the information processing prop-erties of individual human agents. The cognitive science approach provides a very useful frame for thinking about thinking. When this frame is applied to the individual human agent, one asks a set of questions about the mental An initial analysis of speed bugs as cognitive artifacts was completed in November of 1988. Since then, my knowledge of the actual uses of speed bugs and my understanding of their role in cockpit cognition has changed dramatically. Some of the ideas in this paper were presented
Keyphrases
cockpit remembers individual human agent cognitive science individual agent cognitive property speed bug com-mercial aviation actual us technological device indi-vidual mind successful completion cognitive psychology commercial airliner cockpit cognition distributed system socio-technical system cognitive science approach useful frame theoretical framework primary unit memory task powerful model initial analysis cognitive artifact information processing property many human endeavor
