Implications of future technology environments: modifications to the nature of human performance and the necessary skills to operate in a future technology landscape

Aim: the aim of this collaborative research program between Swinburne University of Technology and the Defence Science and Technology Organisation is to identify the critical skills and necessary human performance requirements (both cognitive and physiological) for the future warfighter working as part of a complex human-machine environment. Background: human-machine boundaries are shifting, such that concepts of identity, autonomy, responsibility and trust need to be re-examined within a cognitive framework that can accommodate sensory and physical augmentation, complex information management and cognitive processes distributed across humans, machines and human-machine interfaces. This report focuses on measurement and modelling of human capabilities and performance, particularly in the cognitive domain. Measures of mental workload and performance: we begin with an overview of the long history and wide range of measures of mental workload and performance. Many of these have been shown to have good reliability and predictive validity, such that many of them work well to measure and predict capability and performance within specified domains. There is less confidence in the criterion validity and construct validity of measures of mental workload and associated psychological variables, and only limited consensus on the relationship among physiological measures and their putative cognitive correlates. A major concern with measuring cognitive parameters is whether they actually reflect an underlying quantitative structure to be measured. While the information-processing models of human cognition that are commonly used in human factors research have provided useful frameworks for guiding the development of human-machine interfaces and for solving problems in specific task environments, they may not be sufficiently robust to support consideration of future human-machine environments and unknown task scenarios. Different philosophical approaches to cognition, such as the notion of embodied cognition, phenomenological approaches that emphasise sense-making through the nature of interactions with agents and environments, and approaches supporting the distributed nature of cognition, need to be explored.