The Forgotten History of Cognitive Task Analysis

Many reports of recent research on topics in cognitive systems engineering describe their methods by distinguishing cognitive task analysis from “traditional” or “behavioral” task analysis. A hallmark of modern cognitive task analysis (CTA) methods is that they place primary focus on understanding the cognitive demands of a task and the knowledge and strategies that underlie performance. While cognitive task analysis may have seemed to be a revolutionary approach introduced in recent years, a review of the history of task analysis reveals many things that have been lost in modern treatments of the history of human factors. This presentation will review some highlights of this forgotten history, including the ideas and methods of the Psychotechnicians, the earliest industrial psychologists, the Taylorists, and others who contributed to modern CTA. Task analysis never lacked cognitive categories. Even microscale “time and motion” studies involved the analysis of the work of domain experts. Basic ideas of human -machine systems and of complexity also appear in some of the earliest literatures — industrial psychology of the first decades of the 20th century.