Integrated Models of Cognitive Systems

The field of cognitive modelling has progressed beyond modelling cognition in the context of simple laboratory tasks and begun to attack the problem of modelling cognition in more complex, realistic environments, such as those studied by researchers in the field of human-factors. The problems that the human-factors community is tackling focus on modelling certain problems of communication and control that arise in the integration of implicit and explicit knowledge, emotion, and cognition, and the cognitive system with the external environment. These problems must be addressed in order to produce integrated cognitive models of moderately complex tasks. Architectures of cognition in these tasks focus on the control of a central system, which includes control of the central processor itself, initiation of functional processes, such as visual search and memory retrieval, and harvesting the results of functional processes. Because the control of the central system is conceptually different from the internal control required by individual functional processes, a complete architecture of cognition must incorporate two types of theories of control: type 1 theories of the structure, functionality, and operation of the controller, and type 2 theories of the internal control of functional processes, how, and what they communicate to the controller. This volume presents, for both types of theories, the current state of the art, as well as contrasts among current approaches to human-performance models.