HOW A COCKPIT REMEMBERS ITS SPEEDS

Cognitive science normally takes the individual agent as its unit of a nalysis. in many human endeavors, however, the outcomes of interest ar e not determined entirely by the information processing properties of individuals. Nor con they be inferred from the properties of the indiv idual agents, alone, no matter how detailed the knowledge of the prope rties of those individuals may be. In commercial aviation, for example , the successful completion of a flight is produced by a system that t ypically includes two or more pilots interacting with each other and w ith a suite of technological devices. This article presents a theoreti cal framework that takes a distributed, socio-technical system rather than an individual mind as its primary unit of analysis. This framewor k is explicitly cognitive in that it is concerned with how information Is represented and how representations are transformed and propagated in the performance of tasks. An analysis of a memory task in the cock pit of a commercial airliner shows how the cognitive properties of suc h distributed systems can differ radically from the cognitive properti es of the individuals who inhabit them.