The Phenomenal Basis of Human Factors: Situating and Distributing Cognition Within Real-World Activities

摘要

During the past 30 years it has increasingly come to pass that cognition is an important and relevant topic for the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) to spend greater time understanding, evolving, and utilizing as relevant for individual and team work. When we consider cognition as a phenomenon it should not be connoted simply as a static, inside-the-head, backward-looking concept from the past. Nor should it only be studied as a deep anatomical, structural model of neuroscience (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques showing activation areas for certain thought sequences) even though there are promising results here that are informative. Alternatively, the overriding question for HFES is, How is cognition situated, shared, and distributed within real-world confines?