Cognition in the Automated Cockpit: A Coherence Perspective

Abstract

Much of the focus of papers in this symposium has been on using cues in the decision-making environment, input from relevant sources, and knowledge from past experience to assess current situations and make decisions. The cognitive processes inherent in these tasks are critical to success in the aviation environment; however, attention must also be paid to the cognitive requirements for effective diagnosis and decision making within the automated cockpit. Most importantly, in terms of theoretical and practical implications, the sophistication of automated systems in the cockpit means that pilots have access to highly reliable and accurate information (rather than probabilistic cues). This change demands that we examine cognitive processing within the automated cockpit in terms of the match or mismatch between the cognitive behavior elicited by the electronic environment, the cognitive response required by the task, and the cognitive strategy adopted by the pilot. The premise of this paper is that a framework that accomplishes this can be found in correspondence and coherence, complementary metatheories of judgment and decision making, and in the Cognitive Continuum Theory of judgment (CCT; e.g., Hammond 1996, 2000; Hammond, Hamm, Grassia, & Pearson, 1997), and that the nature of the pilot's cognitive task in the automated cockpit has been altered from a largely intuitive, correspondence-based task to a primarily analytical, coherence-based task. The purpose of this paper will be to briefly describe these theories and their relevance to diagnosis and decision making in the automated cockpit, and to explore whether the design of automated systems supports or hinders requisite cognitive strategies.