Abstracts - Spring 2003

THEORETICAL AND RESEARCH ARTICLES

Design Activities: How to Analyze Cognitive Effort Associate to Cognitive Treatments?

Nathalie Bonnardel and Annie Piolat, University of Provence

Working memory issues are important in many real-life activities. Thus, measuring cognitive effort (or mental load) has been a main research topic for years in cognitive ergonomics, though no consensual method to study this aspect has been proposed, in addition, we argue that cognitive effort has to be related to an analysis of the evolution of cognitive procedss3s (or "time processing"). From this perspective, we present and discuss experimental procedures that have been used for years to study writing activities. In experiments reported in this paper, these procedures are used for studying design activities, in the context of computer graphics and we site design.

Memory of Past Designs: Distinctive Roles in Individual and Collective Design

Françoise Détienne, EIFFEL Research Group "cognition and Cooperation in Design" INRIA

Empirical studies on design have emphasized the role of memory of past solutions. Design involves the use of generic knowledge as well as episodic knowledge about past designs for analogous problems: in this way, it involves the reuse of past designs. We analyze this mechanism of reuse from a socio-cognitive viewpoint. According to a purely cognitive approach, reuse involves cognitive mechanisms linked to the problem solving activity itself. Our socio-cognitive approach accounts for these phenomena as well as reuse mechanisms linked to cooperation, in particular coordination, and confrontation/integration of viewpoints.

Delete Memories: Learning Through Deliberate Forgetting.

Oronzo Parlangeli, Francesca Rizzo, University of Siena and Sebastiano Bagnara, Politecnico di Milano

Failures in memory performances tend to be associated with a negative value, forgetting is thus perceived as something to be avo8ided in order to improve both everyday and working activities. Far from being a common sense interpretation this consideration of forgetting has also characterized most of the scientific literature on forgetting. But, as in everyday life we are frequently unable to process all the information available to us, it seems that some type of forgetting of information is necessary. In fact, most of the time people have to replace old information with new as the contest changes. The present work focuses, through a series of theoretical reflections, on the positive role of forgetting. By doing so the article presents many experimental investigations that might contribute to a new hypothesis of forgetting as a way to better design and implement training activities in contests that are characterized by high levels of uncertainty due to sudden environmental changes.

The Representation of context in the Simulation of complex Systems

Patrizia Marti and Petra Scrivani, University of Siena

This paper moves from the recognition of the importance of the role of context in determining human action. By context we mean social and cultural properties of an environment as defined by activity theory (Kaptelinin, 1996). According to activity theory, human beings live in an environment that is meaningful in itself. This environment consists of entities that combine all kinds of objective features, including the culturally determined ones, which, in turn, determine the way people act on these entities. This notion of context is fundamental for understanding the role of artifacts in mediating human action. In the paper, we adopt the activity theory framework to reflect upon how to represent "the context" for accessing the impact of new technologies in complex systems like air traffic control (ATC)/. Nowadays. The validation of such technologies is mostly performed through the simulation of the operational environment, where controllers perform their activity as if they were in a real situation. We describe an experience we made simulating the activity of an air traffic control tower in managing aerodrome traffic. The simulation was carried out using structured scenarios to represent activities really observed in the control tower and adapted to fit the context of simulation (more advanced control tools, subset of controllers working together). These scenarios offered a valid contribution toward the representation of the context on complex systems like ATC. They successfully contributed to recreate realistic situations where the system components were subject to the full variability of input data and situations that may occur in the real world. Through the description and discussion of the case study, we argue that social and cultural properties of the context need to be represented and analyzed, as well as the physical and cognitive aspects of the human-system interaction. The analysis of these properties can be beneficial in particular for assessing the impact of the introduction of new technology or the application of new operational concepts on safety.

Differential Roles for Visuospatial and Verbal Working Memory in the Construction of Mental Models of Physical Systems.

José Juan Cañas, Ladislao Salmerón, Adoración Antoli, Immaculada Fajardo, University of Granada, Spain, Christiana Chisalita, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, and Juan Tomás Escudero, University of Balearic Islands, Spain.

People use mental models while interacting with physical systems. Designers have been using knowledge elicitation techniques to inf3er user's mental model in order to design interfaces compatible with it. However , to use those techniques correctly we need to define a model that shows how mental models are constructed and simulated during the execution of the elicitation task, Cañas and Antoli (1998) proposes that a mental model is a dynamic representation created in working memory (WM) by combining information stored in long-term memory (the user's conceptual model of the system) and characteristics extracted from the environment. This paper describes an experiment that analyzes the role of the WM components in the construction of mental models. It is concluded that both structure and function information of mental models is processed at the visuospatial component of WM. In addition, data supports the idea the function information is also processed at the verbal component of WE. Finally, some theoretical and practical implications for research on mental models and the use of knowledge elicitation techniques are discussed.

Organizational Memory: The Product of a Reflexive Activity

C. Sauvagnac and P. Falzon, Laboratorie d'ergonmomie du CNAM-41 rue Gay-Lussac, Paris.

Developing an organizational memory (OM) has become a necessity because of the constant and fast evolution of organizations. OM is the result of the process of organizational learning, defined by its temporal characteristics and by way of its circulation. Building of OM requires a reflexive activity. A Field study suggests that during therapeutic decision making. The reflexive use of criteria is a critical issue allotting values to criteria allows one to build knowledge. Decision making mobilizes knowledge for mutual learning, but also changes knowledge. This mechanism needs tools: organizational tools and reports for keeping track of decisions.