Cognitive Ergonomics

Dr. Manish Kumar Asthana

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Uttarakhand
Lecture-3

Human Cognitive Abilities and Skills-I

Hello everyone. I welcome you all in this 4-week lecture series of Cognitive Ergonomics.
Today, we are going to address the topic Human Cognitive Abilities and Skills. Now, human
cognitive abilities and skills is comprised of several cognitive abilities. However, in this lecture
series, I will be addressing upon sensation and perception, attention, learning and memory,
thinking and language. Before I begin with, it is important for us to understand that how
humans process information.

The information could be in any form. It could be visual in nature, it could be auditory in
nature, it could be tactile in nature and it could be in any other sensory form. Now, what you
see on your screen, the model has been considered as information processing model explained
by Wickels in his book Human Factor Engineering which is supposed to be the course book
also for this course. What happens? The sensory system, there are basically 5 and more sensory
system.

To name the most basic sensory system, visual, olfactory, taste, smell, hearing, touch are basic.
These sensory system becomes activated in presence of the sensory stimuli. What happens is
that there is a sensory registry to it and this sensory registry is ensuring how to save these
different type of sensory information into human cognition. Based on inter-individual
differences, these sensory system may uptake up regulate or down regulate the sensory
information. Now, there are 3 different types of processing.

One is the top-down processing which is also known as conceptually driven and then another
is the bottom-up processing which is a stimuli driven. Anything present in the environment,
we are prone to process that. If there is a foul smell in the environment, then we are inclined
to smell that foul smell. So, from the sensory system, we receive the sensory information and
it goes into our registry. So, but once it is being registered, the attention system starts to act
upon which sensory information is necessary, which sensory information is unnecessary and
requires an attention or requires late attention and that is why the earlier selection of
information is important.
 The perceptual encoding is there which encodes the meaningful interpretation of the incoming
sensory information. It tries to save that information coming from sensory registry for the
future reference. Then there is a central processing system which ensures whatever amount of
information we have selected, whatever the amount of information attention system has
preference to get registered for the future preference. And then the final stage is how to respond
it. So, from sensory registry, selected information which is being attended to leads towards the
perception.

Perception is providing meaningful interpretation for incoming sensory information. If you

are sensing an apple in the environment, then perception will attach meaning that is it is an
apple, not an orange or a banana. After that, the response selection is there. Once the response
has been selected, then it leads to response execution, how to execute a response. At the level
of perception, long term memory is getting involved.

Now, the long-term memory is getting involved which means there should be a recollection
of information from your stored memory. And your long memory, long term memory is there
to support you, to provide you information with. When we do such registries, registration of
information, encoding of information, we categorize the information. And once we do the
categorization, we save information in a long-term memory based on categorization. Then
there is another stage to it where the thinking and decision making is involved.

So, from perception, there is a loop going outside, one going to response selection, another is
coming to decision making. Some responses cannot be selected so easily. Those responses
require decision making. And these responses which require decision making, then lead
towards the response selection. What could be those situations under which perception is not
directly leading to response selection? It could be the task which is novel in nature and which
is ambiguous in nature.

So, the participant or individual is not capable to solve the problem. He requires some
decision making. This decision making is taking the help of working memory. Working
memory which is active in nature, working memory which is having four components, working
memory which is manipulating the information. And this working memory has direct uptake
from the long-term memory and also constantly maintain and update the information which is
present there in the long-term memory.

Now, what we see is that through these red arrows, there is a feedback loop to the sensory
registry that a response has been executed, the action has been taken up. Now the new action
is required, new response is required. As a result, this loop gets connected to sensory registry
again. And the cycle goes on and on and on. It is a very dynamic process and it is a very rapid
process.
 The way you are seeing on your screen, human cognition does not work at such a pace. It
works at very quick and sharp pace. Some basic human abilities and skills which we are
familiar with, how well a person sings, how well a person communicate, how well a person
manages his time, how well a person execute the task, how well a person solves a problem. All
these are human abilities and skills. Not everybody can be a singer, not everybody can be a
leader, not everybody can be an administrator, not everybody can be an executor.

Each and every individual is unique in its own capabilities and abilities. These abilities and
skills help an individual at workplace setting. An engineer may play a role in constructing a
building, the type of material required, the type of a stone required, the place, the weather, the
inhabitants, the stakeholder and many more variables. Similarly, the designer will be paying
attention towards aesthetic, visual appearances. Similarly, the construction worker will not be
paying too much attention on technicalities of building or technicalities on building a building.

But how much labor, how much force is required to lift a cement bag and what price he or she
is going to be paid for that. Different nature of work involves different nature of cognitive
abilities. One work may require more cognitive ability than the other. Some may be paying
more attention towards visualization. And that is why a discipline of visual ergonomics has its
own way to address human factor.

Some people have to make a quick decision before the weather goes bad, before the rain starts
and spoils the construction. Some decisions take long time, building a rooftop, building a
penthouse. Some people solving a problem of drainage, some people may be solving a problem
of electrical wire installation. Some people may be solving a problem of legal paper works.
Different nature of work requires different nature of cognitive abilities.

Rehearsal, rehearsal of what? Rehearsal of knowledge, rehearsal of information which an

individual learn in his or her college time. How to construct a building? What should be the
size of columns? What should be the size of terrace? What should be the height of ceiling?
What should be the composite material one can use it? The planning. Planning to lay a brick
wall till the planning to complete the full infrastructure. And then among all these things,
understanding the problem, solving the problem, understanding the communication and
addressing the communication. These six parameters or variables which you are seeing on
your screen, we are involving them in our day-to-day activity.

If you take an example of preparing a coffee, then visualizing how coffee is different from a
tea, making a decision, coffee has to be taken in what quantity? Solving a problem means
preparation of a coffee can be seen as a problem solving. Rehearsing that if you have prepared
a coffee prior hand, how you have prepared it and how are you going to prepare it again?
Planning the stages, the sequential step which is required to prepare a coffee before milk goes
or before sugar goes or before coffee goes. To what temperature one has to boil? To what
temperature it has to stop? And understanding the taste of the coffee and additional parameters
or information related to it. Now, let me take you to provide you information on sensation and
perception. What is the difference between this sensation and perception? Sensation is only
involving our sensory receptor and nervous system to receive and represent stimulus energies.

So, the eye is sensing the world, acquiring the visual information, but your brain does not
understand the physical information. The information which your eye is capturing and
acquiring and presenting it and sending it through to your brain. Brain understand the neural
information. So, sensation is only receiving input from the sensory organ. And through a
process of transduction, this sensory information get converted into neural information.

Once this neural information is converted and reaches to your retina, then the meaning is
assigned to it. The meaningful interpretation of the incoming sensory information enables you
to recognize the object and event. This is perception. So, the brain makes sense out of the
incoming sensory input from the sensory organ.

Now sensation is basic. Perception involves cognition, where you are providing meaning to
it, where you are thinking if you have seen the object or not, if you have experienced the object
or not, if you have seen and experienced, then where, how it is being involved. It is important
here for us to take a minute and think, is sensation important or perception important? And the
role of cognitive ability as like sensation and perception, this skill is important or not. The easy
example which I would like to show you is the traffic signal. Your eye may acquire the red,
yellow and green color. Your eyes may acquire this physical energies from these three lights
from the environment.

But the moment your brain starts to provide meaning to it, that red light means stop, yellow
lights slow, green light means to go. That is perception. Not only that, redundancy gain is
there. What do I mean with that? Not only the color of the light is providing you an insight
what decision has to be made here, but the ordering of the light. The sequential ordering of the
light is also providing you an aid to make and to take to do a decision making.

If you should drive a car, if you should stop a car. The ordering like red comes first, it is most
important. Then comes the yellow because from slow to, from stop to movement, there should
be a transition and this transition is being reflected in yellow light. So, this is how the light is
being interpreted. So sensory system is just requiring the physical energy from the environment
and then the brain is processing this information and taking a conclusion deciding that one has
to move and a car starts to move, driver starts to move the car.

Now as I showed you earlier, the levels of perception are there. Top-down processing which
is conceptually driven, bottom-up processing which is stimuli driven. If there is a stimulus
present in the environment and we are not and we have never experienced this stimulus, then
we are going to do a bottom-up processing. And if we are experienced with the nature of the
stimuli, with the information, we do a top-down processing because we have a template of it,
we know the nature of the problem itself, so we do a top-down processing. Now there are three
levels of perception.

When the top-down processing and bottom-up processing partially involved, they come
together, they lead towards the unitization where they get united. So, one is stimuli driven as
you can see in the bottom, this side and then another is this conceptually driven based on your
concept. Many a time it has been seen that children's when they are learning, they do lot of
bottom-up processing. But as we experienced, we have experienced, we do lot of top-down
processing. In top-down processing what do we do? In models, it can be a mathematical
model, ideas, expectation and interpreting the sensory information.

We all come are having our discipline and each one of us are having our own discipline. Now
the bottom-up processing, when a novel information is there, there is a novelty involved.
Unitization takes the middle road and tries to combine this information. So, what do we see at
next level is the bottom-up processing, top-down processing and unitization. The application
of human cognition is used in the navigation.

Navigation is the most complicated task. In the navigation, an individual has to navigate a
pathway. He has to localize the environment; he has to localize the different stimuli present in
the environment. Not only that, in the navigation, he has to remember information. In the
navigation, he has to pay attention to where he is heading to. In the navigation, he has to do a
decision making, reasoning why a left has to be taken, but not the right.

Navigation involves several cognitive abilities. It is always been suggested that in the
navigation, the information should be visually heightened and also it should be visually aided.
Several memory aids should be provided. Several perceptual aids should be provided so that
user can navigate in the environment. A professional driver always minds his gap while driving
a car on the road.

A novice driver faces such challenges. An experienced driver builds his own mental
representation cognitive map for the navigation and he may have more than one or two
templates. A novice driver faces several challenges to come up with a mental map. It may take
some more time for him to build such map. In addition to that, his anticipation of threat, his
anxiety may inhibit him, may interfere in the representation of such mental map. Now there
are several cognitive abilities required in the navigation.
 We will just look into the perception and the guidelines in perception which is required.
Guidelines in perception with respect to human factor is maximizing a bottom-up process.
How shall we maximize the bottom-up process? If we have to inculcate the traffic rule, if we
have to teach individuals to follow traffic rule, we have to maximize the bottom-up process.
Along with traffic light, instructions need to be posted and pasted so that people are exposed
to these processes. We have to also maximize the unitization and automaticity.

Unitization as we discussed earlier, where the top-down processing and bottom-up processing
coming together and doing a handshake. This maximization will help the perceiver to provide
meaningful interpretation to the incoming information. Third stage is maximizing the top-
down process when bottom-up process is poor, when the bottom-up processing is too complex
to understand. For instance, how to drive an aeroplane? We are not a pilot. But following a
sequential task may be very challenging.

Because more than 5 to 6 steps are required to fly a plane and each one of them processes
require coordination. So, one can maximize the top-down processes in that regard. Just one
system, that is it. So, when the bottom-up process is poor, one can maximize the top-down
system.

This may avoid the confusion. How one can maximize the top-down process? By using a
smaller vocabulary. Small words, just for the cue.

Open- Close, On- Off, Twist, Pick, Pull. Small vocabulary. Along with that, if we can create
a context, context itself is going to provide an aid in perception. Exploiting the redundancy.
As I was telling you couple of minutes ago, more than one way to respond, providing an aid to
the primary response, one can exploit this redundancy. So only one response is there or present
which can aid to come up with a meaningful interpretation.

And, then usability testing in the real environment. Most of the, in most of the cases what we
have seen is that we are performing the testing in a closed environment in a lab. But performing
an experiment or performing a test in a closed, in the closed walls, inside the closed walls is
different than the open environment. The open environment is more challenging and complex
in nature. So, the usability testing has to be performed in real environment. For instance, the
car testing has to be performed on the road, in the crowd, the motorbike testing.

If any car or motor or bike agencies claiming that we offer the best solution for the terrain
road, then they have to do the testing in the terrain. So, if we take a minute to think here, what
we shared, what we have shared is that the guidance to perception. The first principle says that
maximize the bottom-up processing. Maximize the unitization and automaticity.
 So, the chances of error will be slim, minimal. Maximize the top-down process when bottom-
up process is poor, when there is no aid being provided from the stimuli driven, the stimuli
which I am not familiar with. In that case, the top-down process is important. It is very
important for us to understand that the sensation and perception are two independent processes,
but they go hand in hand. And there are three different levels of processing which contributes
in the guidelines. Now, if we move forward from after sensation perception, the topic which
we have to see closely is the memory.

Recollection of information from the stored memory is an important phenomenon, is a crucial

phenomenon. Failure to recollect information from the memory may result into an error, may
result into a fault. What you see on your screen is the accident image, train accident image in
the year 1875. Now in India, we have been experiencing such real incidents every now and
then. Who is operating these trailway tracks? We are in 2023, the tracks is automated, but still
not every automaticity is having 100 percent automatic.

It requires some level of human interference; some level of human involvement is there. And
when we are talking about the involvement of human being, person, then we are talking about
the human error. And this human error is the result of memory failure. Person may have forgot
that he is putting the two trains on the same track. Person do not remember that there is a train
on the same track for too long.

Person may fail to signal the first train to leave and he signal the second train to go ahead on
the same track. Machines used to fail earlier, but in modern world, humans seem to fail more
than the machines. And that is the objective of such courses to highlight where humans can
fail. If they are failing at in the sensation level, are they failing at perception level, are they
failing at memory level, etcetera and etcetera. So, to conclude the lecture, what we learned
earlier is that sensation is a basic processes which assess the perception.

It provides information to the perception and perception can be conceptually driven or

extremely driven. Perception also does unitization under normal circumstances. Perception as
a cognitive ability assist the human beings in the navigation, in way finding, where human
beings have to localize the environment, register the environment and execute the task. Also,
we understood that the memory failure indicates the failure of human cognition, which
ultimately leads into human error.

With this, I would like to say thank you and see you in the next lecture. Thank you.