PNNL

Abstract

Nearly a half-century ago, J.C.R. Licklider expressed a vision for “man-machine symbiosis,” coupling human brains and computing machines in a partnership that “will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.” Until relatively recently, this vision was largely left idle by human factors engineering (HFE) research that grew over the decades from an initial focus on design of equipment to accommodate human limitations to cognitive systems engineering research to a more recent perspective focusing on design of human-information interaction. These perspective shifts and insights have brought a degree of success to the field in design efforts aimed at enhancing human-system performance. In recent years, the research area of augmented cognition has begun to shift the focus once more not only to enhancing the interaction environment, but also the cognitive abilities of the human operators and decision makers themselves. Ambitious goals of increasing total cognitive capacity through augmented cognition technologies are still on the horizon of this research program. This paper describes a framework within which augmented cognition research may identify requirements that compensate for human information processing shortcomings and augment human potential.