Cognitive engineering is a method of study using
cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning.
Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which ...
to design and develop engineering systems to support the cognitive processes of users.
History
It was an engineering method used in the 1970s at
Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),
then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996)
and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007),
is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...
, focused on how people form a
cognitive model A cognitive model is an approximation of one or more cognitive processes in humans or other animals for the purposes of comprehension and prediction. There are many types of cognitive models, and they can range from box-and-arrow diagrams to a set o ...
of a system based upon common metaphors.
As explained, by
Joseph Henry Condon
Joseph Henry 'Joe' Condon (born February 15, 1935 January 2, 2012) was an American computer scientist, engineer and physicist, who spent most of his career at Bell Labs. The son of Edward Condon (a distinguished American nuclear physicist, pion ...
:
According to Condon, the ideas of cognitive engineering were developed later than, and independent from, the early work on the
Unix
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...
operating system.
Don Norman
Donald Arthur Norman (born December 25, 1935) is an American researcher, professor, and author. Norman is the director of The Design Lab at University of California, San Diego. He is best known for his books on design, especially ''The Design ...
cited principles of cognitive engineering in his 1981 article, "The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid." Norman criticized the
user interface
In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fr ...
of Unix as being "a disaster for the casual user."
However the "casual user" is not the target audience for UNIX and as the Condon quote above indicates, a high level of user interface abstraction leads to cognitive models that may be "totally erroneous."
See also
*
History of Unix
The history of Unix dates back to the mid-1960s, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric were jointly developing an experimental time-sharing operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe.
...
*
Outline of human–computer interaction
References
Bell Labs
Human–computer interaction
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