UNCLAS: Dist A. Approved for public release THE ARMY’S NEED FOR COGNITIVE ENGINEERING Kaleb McDowell, Ph.D. Human Research & Engineering Directorate U.S. Army Research Laboratory Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD Harry J. Zywiol, Jr. Ground Vehicle Simulation Laboratory U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Engineering & Development Center Warren, MI ABSTRACT Imagine Soldiers reacting to an unpredictable, dynamic, stressful situation on the battlefield. How those Soldiers think about the information presented to them by the system or other Soldiers during this situation – and how well they translate that into thinking into effective behaviors – is critical to how well they perform. Importantly, those thought processes (i.e., cognition) interact with both external (e.g., the size of the enemy force, weather) and internal (e.g., ability to communicate, personality, fatigue level) factors. The complicated nature of these interactions can have dramatic and unexpected consequences, as is seen in the analysis of military and industrial disasters, such as the shooting down of Iran Air flight 655, or the partial core meltdown on Three Mile Island. In both cases, decision makers needed to interact with equipment and personnel in a stressful, dynamic, and uncertain environment. Similarly, the complex and dynamic nature of the contemporary operating environment faced by the United States Army makes it clear that mission performance depends on systems that are engineered to ensure that the complex systems of people and technology (i.e., sociotechnical systems) can sustain high levels of cognitive performance needed for succeed. This session overview highlights cognitive engineering and illustrates how modeling and simulation can address different aspects of this important field. INTRODUCTION Imagine Soldiers operating a complex, multi-function crew station while encapsulated in the back of military vehicle reacting to an unpredictable, dynamic, stressful situation on the battlefield. Importantly, how those Soldiers think about the information presented to them by the system or other Soldiers during this situation — and how they translate that thinking into effective behaviors — is critical to how well they perform. With advancing technologies, however, it has become clear that performance will not reflect the Soldier’s thought processes alone, but rather that systems will at a minimum impact Soldiers thinking (e.g., through the selective presentation of information) and in many cases will make decisions directly (e.g., see autonomous navigation technologies). Here, we define cognition broadly as the mental processing that, in humans, occurs within the brain. In early conceptions, the term cognition denoted ―higher-level‖ abstractions (e.g. decision making), as distinguished from processes closer to either perception or movement control, nor did it emphasize emotional, historical, cultural, and other contextual (e.g., environmental) factors [2]. In contrast, many contemporary researchers regard the distinctions between these factors as largely artificial, and view cognition as encompassing physical, mental, and social aspects of human behavior [3]. In our definition, the actions of the Soldier-system, such as making decisions and generating physical movement, results from many Soldier and system processes, working together, along with other processes that integrate or modulate them (e.g., attention, arousal, and mood). Cognitive engineering is concerned with the importance of the interactions between the humans and systems (i.e., sociotechnical interactions), how these interactions effectively create cognition to enhance performance, and the potentially disastrous consequences of failing to address these interactions. Generally stated for the Army, cognitive engineers attempt to design Soldier-systems that facilitate performance by focusing on the ―thinking‖ aspects within sociotechnical systems [1]. SOCIOTECHNICAL INTERACTIONS Ensuring that the Soldier-system ―thinks well‖ is not a trivial matter. Returning to the Soldiers operating the multi- function crew station, the overall ―thinking‖ or cognition will be impacted by both external (out of the Soldier-systems control: e.g., the size of the enemy force, the time of day, temperature) and internal (e.g., ability to communicate, Soldier’s personalities/system intelligence, Soldier