The modern work environment continues to grow in complexity with changing collaborative mixes of humans and computers, who have to conduct difficult, challenging, and sometimes risky tasks, often under conditions of data overload and uncertainty. At the same time, advances in technology have opened new horizons that are changing the nature of work and education, including distance learning, distance collaboration, training support, and performance support.
IHMC researchers are advancing our knowledge of how workers, including teams of humans and smart machines, coordinate and perform complex tasks. By gaining a rich empirical understanding of “sociotechnical work systems,” this research supports the re-design of legacy technologies and design of revolutionary new technologies to improve collaborative human machine cognitive work.
IHMC researchers use a variety of methods of cognitive task analysis and cognitive field research to help envision and design complex cognitive systems. IHMC scientists are “expert apprentices,” entering any given domain to analyze the work environment. Their research relies on principles of human-centered computing and a theoretical base: the theory of complex cognitive systems and the macrocognition framework. This foundation includes a number of laws that describe how cognitive work is conducted in complex sociotechnical context, and a roadmap for evaluating technology in terms of usefulness and usability.
Experts in a given field possess knowledge and skills that cannot possibly be captured in anything like a simple check list. IHMC researchers create methods for eliciting,preserving, and disseminating the wisdom of experts. In addition, they explore the nature of tasks and modes of reasoning and learning that can impede the development of expertise and skill or can lead to cognitive difficulty and error by novices and experts alike.
To elicit the knowledge of experts, IHMC researchers rely on a variety of techniques. Interviews with experts are informative, but review of documents such as training manuals and first-hand observation augment the researcher’s understanding of the work. Working together,the researcher and the expert then construct explicit models of problem solving in the domain. These models are often constructed using IHMC’s CmapTools software. The resulting models are often in a form that can be directly converted into tools for training and performance support.