Macrocognition Metrics: Meaningful Measures for Complex Processes

Increasingly we see business functions and military operations engaging systems that are interconnected and interdependent with an even greater degree of cognitive work distributed among people and machines. From this we will see an increased need to understand how individuals and teams in these environments are able to work together to plan, think, decide, solve problems, and take action as integrated units. This panel brings together leading researchers from the burgeoning field of macrocognition to discuss their research. In cognitive engineering and related scientific disciplines the term macrocognition has been contrasted with microcognition to illustrate differing types of cognitive processes. What complicates the issue is that these distinctions consider not only the realization of cognition in the real world but also a level of analysis. Panel members will discuss issues arising out of research to understand complex and collaborative activities in vivo and in situ and in the development of the appropriate metrics to measure dynamic cognitive processes in such environments.