Distributed cognition in an airline cockpit

Abstract

In earlier research on the organization of work, Hutchins developed a theory of distributed cognition that takes as its unit of analysis a culturally constituted functional group rather than an individual mind. This theory is concerned with how information is propagated through a system in the form of representational states of mediating structures. These structures include internal as well as external knowledge representations, (knowledge, skills, tools, etc.). This approach permits us to describe cognitive processes by tracing the movement of information through a system and characterize the mechanisms of the system which carry out the performance, both on the individual and the group level. In this paper we apply this approach to the structure of activity in a commercial airline cockpit. A cockpit provides an opportunity to study the interactions of internal and external representational structure and the distribution of cognitive activity among the members of the crew. Through an analysis of audio and video recordings of the behaviors of real airline flight crews performing in a high fidelity flight simulator we demonstrate that the expertise in this system resides not only in the knowledge and skills of the human actors, but in the organization of the tools in the work environment as well. The analysis reveals a pattern of cooperation and coordination of actions among the crew which on one level can be seen as a structure for propagating and processing information and on another level appears as a system of activity in which shared cognition emerges as a system level property. Copyright © 1995, Edwin Hutchins & Tove Klausen. All rights reserved. Cockpit Cognition 5/18/00 2 Most people who travel frequently by air occasionally find themselves sitting in the passenger cabin wondering what is happening on the other side of the cockpit door. What are the pilots doing, and whatever it is they are doing, are they doing it well? Although we cannot present you with data from an actual flight, we can give you the next best thing: data from an actual airline flight crew performing in a very high fidelity flight simulator. Consider the transcript below. This is taken from a full-mission simulation of a flight from Sacramento, California to Los Angeles, California. It is the second flight of the day for this particular crew. They are about 8 minutes out of Sacramento and are climbing through nineteen thousand feet toward their cruise altitude of thirty three thousand feet. The simulated aircraft is a Boeing 727-200 which requires a crew of three: Captain (Capt), First Officer (F/O) and Second Officer (S/O). We open the cockpit door and peek inside. The Captain has just removed a departure chart from the control yoke and is replacing it in his airway manual. The first officer is flying the plane, monitoring the flight instruments and handling the controls. The second officer has completed his departure paperwork and begins a departure report by radio to the company offices on the ground.