How the psychological theory of action identification can offer new advances for research in cognitive engineering

摘要

We present the psychological theory of action identification as a framework for a morernin-depth understanding of a human operator’s cognitive activity in the scope of cognitivernengineering. A comparison of theoretical models and findings shows that bothrnframeworks are founded on a similar theory of cognitive control based on an ontologicalrnviewpoint of means–ends relationships with the proposal that an individual mentallyrn‘navigates’ or ‘moves’ through a hierarchical arrangement of these relationships.rnHowever, whilst cognitive engineering begins the analysis from a viewpoint on affordancesrncoming from the external work domain, the action identification theory startsrnfrom a viewpoint on action identities internally attributed to actions by individuals.rnWe show that the conceptual articulation of these two approaches leads to confirmingrnqualitative findings on an agent’s cognitive activity and to proposing general cognitivernprinciples that would explain a single agent’s mental navigation through the abstractionrnhierarchy.