Abstract
Core elements of Endsley’s models of situation awareness can be found in the history of the psychology of attention. History affords cautionary tales about the fuzzy nature of all attention constructs, the trap of reification, and the benefits of mindfulness in the modeling of cognitive phenomena.
“The last word of psychology is ignorance, for the forces engaged are certainly too delicate and numerous to be followed in detail” (William James, 1890, Vol. 1, p. 454). “The mind seems … in the case of attention to mock at all attempts at explanation and to prove itself … a reality separate from its own contents, standing face to face with them, and treating them capriciously now in one way, now in another” (Herrmann Ebbinghaus, 1908, p. 12). “In conclusion of our examination of the various theories of attention … that each has picked out some more or less important concomitant process or some aspect of attention and regarded it as the explanation of all the remaining parts or aspects” (Walter Pillsbury, 1908, p. 290).
Introduction
Where might we look in the history of experimental psychology to find an anchor for our modern notions of attention and situation awareness? The purpose of this essay is to present a capsule view of the history of the concept of attention, as it has been researched in experimental psychology. Particular attention is paid to historical antecedents—if there be any—of a notion of situation awareness. My references are to the first generation of experimental psychologists, though I note how their ideas were largely an extension of previously existing philosophies.
Attention Across History
Concepts of attention, its mechanisms, and experimental findings were discussed and debated at length by essentially all of the major figures whose names are invoked to define the history of experimental psychology. One has to be impressed by the sheer volume of research that is pertinent to concepts of attention prior to World War I. The research can be charted from Frederich Bessel’s investigations of the reaction times of astronomers—who were paying attention to star transits in their telescopes (see Boring, 1950)—to experiments by Johann Herbart and Wilhelm Wundt using the new time recording chronoscopes to experimentally study divided attention. “Attention is the fundamental psychical condition of almost all of the psychometrical researches” in the earliest experimental psychology (Ribot, 1889, p. 73). The research spanned Obersteiner’s (1879) studies of attention comparing men, women, the elderly, and individuals of low intelligence; to James Cattell’s (1886) experiments using his tachistoscope invention. The earliest experimental psychologists—Hermann Helmholtz, Guztav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt—all referred to the attention to sights, sounds, moving objects, persons, the self, etc. (see Wundt, 1874, Vol. 2., Ch. 16). A number of measures were developed, including divided attention tasks, reaction time tasks with priming stimuli, tests of the span of apprehension (we might say, short-term memory capacity), tests of distractability, tests of fatigue during extended periods of responding (see Külpe, 1904; Pillsbury, 1908, Ch. 6), and introspection about the immediate contents of consciousness (which is the primary task used to evaluate the levels situational awareness; see Endsley, 1987). Indeed, there were entire books just on the topic of attention research: Theodule Ribot’s (1889) Psychologie de l’Attention and Walter Pillsbury’s (1908) Attention.
Attention is at once a phenomenon of consciousness (Of what objects or events am I aware?), a phenomenon of perception (What am I seeing?), and a phenomenon of categorization (What kind of thing or event is that?). Attention is both a cause and an effect. Attention “presents” to consciousness an awareness of what is being perceived, in terms of concepts and categories that are already known (memory). Attention thereby allows us to make judgments and decisions. Attention is a bridge between sensation and memory—what one is sensing is related somehow to the concepts and categories residing in memory, allowing for perception and then fuller understanding. Table 1 presents a snapshot history; it could not possibly be exhaustive. Most of the books on general psychology, penned by the first generations of experimental psychologists, had chapters on attention; most of them relied on the metaphors of “focus,” “strain,” and “force” (see Hoffman, Cochran, & Nead, 1990; Pillsbury, 1908, p. 290), and most of them debated the theories of the others at some length (especially see Pillsbury, 1908, Ch. 17).
Brief Statements of Notions of Attention Proposed by Some Leading Figures in the Early History of Experimental Psychology
Attention merited its own chapters in many psychology books, but the concept manifested itself throughout the volumes. For example, Edward Titchener’s (1913) Outline of Psychology had attention as the topic in one of the first chapters, but there were discussions in subsequent chapters of phenomena of attention in hypnosis and in dreams—likewise Chapter 4 in his Beginner’s Psychology, 1915, the Appendix on dreaming and hypnosis. As Table 1 suggests, most of the leaders in the first two generations of experimental psychologists considered attention to be a faculty—that is, a fundamental mental capacity. It was considered to be a matter of volition (deliberate intention or will) and thus involve effort or strain. Attention can be focused, distributed, or wandering. “The selective focusing of psychic energy” was a common metaphor (see Ladd, 1900, p. 46; Sully, 1897, p. 77).
This tradition, of treating attention as one of the primary concepts and topics in experimental psychology meriting its own chapter, faded in the first half of the 20th century, in which the outlines of experimental psychology only mentioned attention, primarily as a sensory-motor phenomenon (e.g., Bills, 1934; Carr, 1925). In Kurt Koffka’s (1935, Ch. 8) Principles of Gestalt Psychology, he introduced into psychology the term The Executive to refer to the ego or consciousness. In that chapter, mostly about reflexes, attention as a technical term appeared only in a few places, and he set the word in italics or within scare quotes, indicating some degree of skepticism concerning the value of the concept. He did refer to the distinction between voluntary and involuntary attention, but “attention” was used just as a word; it was not employed as a concept to do theoretical work for him. The first book bearing the title Cognitive Psychology (Moore, 1939) barely mentioned attention at all. In his History of Experimental Psychology, Edwin Boring (1950) mentioned attention but only with reference to experiments using tachistoscopes and reaction time devices to study the span of immediate apprehension (e.g., experiments by William Hamilton and by James Cattell and Edmund Sanford in Wundt’s laboratory).
Throughout this literature, reference is made primarily to elemental or isolated stimuli (lights, tones, objects, geometric forms, etc.). Most of the references to what we might call “real-world” experiences conform to the isolated stimulus paradigm of the laboratory—the loss of awareness of the ticking of a clock, the noticing of the cessation of a telephone ring, the facilitation of the search for a lost object by the formation of an image of it, or distraction from listening to a speaker by his nervous fiddling with a button on his vest. The latter is among the more complex instances mentioned by Pillsbury (1908) in his book on attention. But as I will show, there is more to this historical tale.
William James on Attention
Attention determines what is “in” immediate awareness and hence determines the contents in the stream of consciousness. Like Fechner, James considered attention to be effortful: The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most voluntary, is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind and we know in the case of many beliefs how constant an effort of the attention is required to keep them in this situation and protect them from displacement by contradictory ideas. (1890, pp. 561-562)
Like others of his era (e.g., Ribot, Ladd, Sully), James considered the effect of attention is to inhibit the awareness of other stimuli, otherwise of sufficient intensity to be sensible. Like others of his era, James considered attention as having two distinct manifestations, one being passive (we might say, attentional capture) and the other being voluntary or a matter of interest (we might say, deliberate, intentional, or top-down). More than anything, however, James (and most of the others) discussed attention as a motor reaction or instinctive response to certain stimuli (e.g., a change in intensity), especially regarding attention as a reaction to emotional states and as a cause of emotional states. Like the others of his era, James paid a great deal of attention to the relation of attention and movements of the eyes and head, contraction of muscles of the forehead, etc. (see also Ribot, 1889). This basic idea of attention as a motor phenomenon has roots in the earlier empiricist philosophy (e.g., Bain, 1855; Mill, 1829).
Like most of the others of his era, James was concerned primarily with applications to education: the ways in which the attention of children wanders, how the teacher might keep children on task, methods of testing mental capacities and measuring individual differences (see also de Garmo, 1895; Pillsbury, 1908, Ch. 6; Ribot, 1889, Ch. 2). On the other hand, it should be noted, Ribot (1889, Ch. 3) was primarily concerned with clinical applications—that is, attention morbidities including hypochondriasis and mania.
Walter Pillsbury on Attention
Walter Pillsbury (1872-1960) was of the second generation of experimental psychologists, a PhD student of Edward Titchener, at Cornell. Pillsbury’s primary interest was the psychology of reasoning (see Pillsbury, 1910). Like others of his era, Pillsbury (1908) began his account of attention by discussing the causes of attentional focus: intensity, change of some sort, distinctiveness, novelty, movement, etc. Like others of his era, he discussed at length the foundational laws of association (frequency, contiguity, etc.). He considered the distinction between voluntary and involuntary attention, and a distinction between attention to objects/events versus attention to ideas (“intellectual attention”; Ch. 7). He distinguished between attention in the sense of having ideas “held in consciousness” versus attention to allow the analysis of the thing being observed so that the perceiver can “get a conception of it” (p. 10).
Like James and others, Pillsbury had great interest in the “motor concomitants” of attention (movement of the eyes, effects on vaso-motor activity, etc.) almost sounding behaviorist when he says “mental activity is really bodily activity … the contraction of muscles result from motor innervations which accompany attention” (p. 63). Two entire chapters were devoted to the anatomical basis of attention (Chs. 14 and 15), specifically the notion of neural connectionism, levels of subsystems, and cortical (frontal lobe) excitation and inhibition as the core explanations for all phenomena of consciousness, attention, and the flow of thought.
Pillsbury made reference to a fluctuation of attention under prolonged exposure (we would call a vigilance decrement), in experiments conducted by Dunlap (1904) and others, which launched a long series of experiments by a number of researchers (see Pillsbury, 1908, Ch, 5 on the “fatigue of cortical cells”). This work presaged the World War II research on the vigilance decrement function. Like Ribot (1889), Pillsbury considered the phenomena of attention in pathology (Ch. 18), but like James, Pillsbury discussed the implications for childhood education (Ch. 20).
Looking across this expansive literature, I now pull out some themes that allow some convergence on the concept of Situation Awareness.
Theme 1: Fuzzy Boundaries
It is clear that the distinction between attention and consciousness is not at all clear. A thread that is woven across history is an uncertainty about the very concept of attention itself. Philosophical psychologies considered the relations of attention to consciousness, to the will, to the span of immediate apprehension, and to other cognitive hypotheticals. All of these concepts are a mere fuzzy boundary away from each other. (The concept of apperception, or apprehension, fell out of use during the ascendency of behaviorism and has never been brought back under the tent of modern cognitive psychology. This important and interesting concept is deserving of its own essay and a rebirth.)
As Pillsbury (1908) said, functions of memory, the will, feeling, reasoning, the self, and others “… cannot be easily dissociated from attention” (p. 149). Reasoning, for example, is merely “association under the influence of attention” (p. 183). “Theories of feeling all go back to attention” (p. 195), but additionally, “at one time or another every phase of the attention process has been treated under the head of apperception” (p. 264). James Mark Baldwin (1894) reduced attention to motor excitation (see Table 1), but at the same time he made heavy reliance on notions of consciousness, ideation, and awareness as causes of movement (e.g., “…the idea of a movement is already the beginning of that movement”; p. 439). Though the concept of attention was the central topic of his book, Pillsbury used it to bring in other fundamental cognitive functions and capacities. For example, Chapter 9 discussed how memory depends on attention. Retention depends on the degree of attention, recall is guided by attention, and attention determines the quickness and correctness of recognition. With his deft pen, Pillsbury related attention to part versus whole learning and to spaced versus massed practice: “Every feature of learning and retention is shot through by attention” (p. 144).
Likewise for Ribot (1889), his book on attention is essentially a book on the nature and contents of consciousness.
According to William James, Wundt’s use of the terms attention, imagination, and apperception were nearly interchangeable (see Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1, p. 439). But this worried James, saying that attention can be thought of as “an effect, and not a cause, a product and not an agent” (p. 450; see also Ribot, 1889, Ch. 1). Yet, as did Sully and others, James also referred to attention as being an “original psychic force” (Vol. 1, p. 253).
Ebbinghaus (1908) was cautious about the concept of attention: “The popular view of attention is that it is an independent being, separate from the contents of the mind. Attention stands at the helm, and as the mind desires these or those contents, attention changes the ship’s course. This, of course, is pure mythology” (Ch. 2, Sec. B.8, p. 89).
Edward Titchener (1913) was “…bothered by the concept of attention. It seemed to him a loose concept, used without rigor as a catch-all for seemingly dynamic events … attention is merely the division of the field of consciousness” by an attribute of clearness (Boring, 1942, p. 22; 1950, p. 415). In the writings of Titchener, it is nearly impossible to separate the concept of attention from the notion of states of consciousness (e.g., 1913, p. 75).
William McDougall (1923) was among the most explicit about problems with the concept of attention: “The word ‘attention’ is often used in psychology as a substantive … attention is said to do this, that, and the other, to make sensations more intense, or clearer, or more prominent in ‘consciousness.’ … Such language is confusing. Let us hold fast to the fact that there is only one agent in all forms of mental activity … an agent who can be properly denoted only by a proper name or pronoun” (p. 265). McDougall saw attention as a matter of striving and interest, an activity and not a capacity or faculty or fundamental mental process.
Edward Thorndike (1905) cautioned about the concept of attention, and not (we might suppose) because he was a pre-behaviorist. Like Titchener and McDougall, he objected to the use of a single word to denote more than one phenomenon of mind: They refer at times to what I shall call the fact of attention and at other times to what I shall call the feelings of attention. In the first case, they mean … that some part of one’s state of mind is focal, prominent or pre-potent … or that some one possible idea is noticed and felt to the exclusion of the others … separate words should be used for each of these … focalness of mental states and … selectedness of mental states … feeling of effort or strain, feeling of interest or attraction, and the feeling of activity or of mental life. (pp. 98-99)
Theme 2: The Psychologist’s Fallacy
An important lesson that we can glean from the history of the concept of attention, and perhaps the most pertinent to the concept of situation awareness, is the lesson of the psychologist’s fallacy and the tendency to reification. Consider this passage from Baldwin (1906): … attention is not a fixed thing, a faculty, any more than are memory or imagination. Yet in much of the literature of late years, in which ‘faculties’ have been scouted, I know of no author who has applied his own criticisms consistently to attention. Attention is still treated as a constant quantity, a fixed thing, the same for all exercises of it, and for all the contents to which it gives its reactions. … Memory is now known to be a function of the content remembered. … So we no longer have one memory, but many: visual, auditory, motor memories. Yet the very same thing is true of attention, we have not one attention but many. Attention is a function of the content, not a faculty that takes up the contents. (p. 444)
We would do well to avoid reifying our hypothetical concepts—that is, be fooled by the terms that happen to come to us in our language, fooled into thinking that our roster of mental processes tells Truths.
The notion that our effort of attending is an original faculty, a force additional to the others of which brain and mind are the seat, may be an abject superstition. (James, 1890, Vol. 1, p. 453; see also Bradley, 1886)
Conclusions with respect to Situation Awareness
My main reason for pointing out these ideas and opinions regarding the concept of attention is that they apply with equal weight and significance to such concepts as situation awareness. One conclusion has to do with aspects of the SA notion that predate our modern era. A second conclusion has to do with the core problem for theories of mind that postulate levels, steps, or stages. A third conclusion has to do with an aspect of SA that actually does seem to be new.
Anticipatory Attention
A thread through the history relates directly to a central notion within the general Situation Awareness concept. This is the distinction between attention to events, objects, sensations (“outer attention” in Sully’s terminology) versus attention to ideas or thoughts (“inner attention,” in Sully’s terminology). Sully referred to “expectant attention” (1897, pp. 84-86), Ribot (1889, Ch. 2) referred to “reflexion,” and likewise James referred to a preattentive process called ideational preparation or anticipatory imagination. “The things we attend to come to us by their own laws. Attention creates no idea; an idea must already be there before we can attend to it. Attention only fixes and retains what the ordinary laws of association bring ‘before the footlights’ of consciousness” (James, 1890, Vol. 1, p. 450). The importance of the idea that is in mind just before the appearance of a stimulus was well known to early attention researchers, going back to the researches of Hermann Helmholtz (see also Münsterberg, 1894). Clearly, this relates to the SA notion of mental projection to the future.
What Do the Boxes and Arrows Mean?
The basic components (or mental acts) that are said to define levels of SA (Endsley, 1987, 1993, 1995) can all be found wafting through the history of the concept of attention. Each of the levels of SA is a clustering of mental processes, most of which were substantively described in the 1700s and 1800s and all of which are a mere fuzzy boundary away from one another, as discussed above. In the SA diagrams, a box of boxes before the point of the decision is a nest of levels (Endsley, 1988, figure 1; 1995, Figure 1; Endsley & Jones, 1997, figure 6). SA Level 1 involves sensation, cue detection, feature identification, monitoring, awareness of states, perception, attention, and others. SA Level 2 involves apperception, comprehension, and interpretation (of that portion of the world that is of concern to the observer). Level 3 SA is called “projection.” At Level 3, Level 1 and Level 2 awareness are extrapolated forward in time to determine how it will affect future states of the operational environment (Endsley, 1995).
The levels of SA boxes-and-arrows model is easily interpreted as a Cartesian causal chain model, especially when occasionally framed as an alternative to the OODA loop notion, or when SA is described as “…the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future” (Endsley, 1988, p. 97). Contributions by Flach and by Endsley (this issue) discuss the subtleties in (mis)interpreting the Endsley model in this way—that is, as a processing sequence going from data (sensation) to percept (information) to apperception or apprehension (knowledge) to decision, and finally to action. Endsley (1995) presented the SA model as an alternative to information processing models and referred to Level 3 as being more “advanced” (p. 32). This implies some sort of hierarchy or priority, easily confused as a causal relation within a processing sequence. Yet Level 1 is described as a “first step in achieving SA” (p. 36). This does imply that events or outcomes at one level feed into events at the next higher level.
Furthermore, if the levels are indeed nested inside a causal chain, but the levels themselves are not a chain, then what is a “level”? If there is confusion here, it is indeed hard to avoid. In Underwood (1957), “levels” were kinds of psychological constructs (phenomena, states, etc.) (see Flach, 1995). In the classic Craik and Lockhart (1972) model, levels referred to the “depth” or amount of processing of a given type. This may be the primary meaning intended by Endsley.
From the standpoint of the history of attention that I have recounted, and given the slipperiness of categories and concepts of mental operations, the SA functions can be seen to inhabit more than one level. Levels 2 and 3 both involve forms of judgment or evaluation. All of the SA processes depend on memory and contact with knowledge. They all involve some form of understanding, or developing a comprehensive picture of the world. Level 2 SA is said to involve the integration of information but that includes integrating information to understand how it will impact upon the individual’s goals and objectives. The use of future tense would seem to ascribe the mental process to Level 3. Level 3 SA is where some magic occurs—conscious awareness of the ongoing events in the world in terms of the observer’s knowledge (i.e., knowledge of the status and dynamics of the elements and comprehension of the situation).
This leads to a general issue of what the arrows mean in the boxes-and-arrows models that inhabit the literature of human factors psychology. In versions of Endsley’s model of SA, standing aside the primary series of boxes and arrows (causal chain?) are boxes labeled by such things as “information processing,” “long-term memory,” “schemas,” “scripts,” and other constructs. This makes three things apparent:
Not all the arrows in the SA models mean the same thing—that is, some seem to represent triggers, some seem to represent partially ordered cause-effect relations, some seem to represent some unspecified form of influence, and some seem to represent the transfer of some type of content or information from one box to the another.
The models of SA are in fact general models of nearly all of cognition. Why such a model should be branded by a single construct of attention is therefore open to question.
Since the model of SA is a general model of cognition, one would naturally ask what its value is in claiming its superiority over models of particular cognitive functions, models that were never intended to be general models of cognition (see Klein, this volume).
Expertise and Perceptual Learning
We see in a few places in our historical legacy a nascent notion of perceptual learning or the effect of expertise. Titchener (1913) referred to “the man of science who is comparing shells or plants may become so absorbed in his work that he forgets his dinner or misses an appointment” (p. 77). William James referred to the trained artist: The whole education of the artist consists in his learning to see the presented signs as well as the represented things. No matter what the field of view means, he sees it also as it feels—that is, as a collection of patches of color bounded by lines—the whole forming an optical diagram of whose intrinsic proportions one who is not an artist has hardly a conscious inkling. The ordinary man’s attention passes over them to their import; the artist’s turns back and dwells upon them for their own sake. (1890, Vol. 1, p. 243)
Pillsbury (1908) discussed at length how attention depends on knowledge and context (task, purpose): The electrical engineer noticing a problem with light in his lab but not when at home, or the botanist turned home gardener recognizing things in his home garden that would pass unnoticed when he is doing botany. “The chemist hardly notices an odor in his lab but finds offense at it when in church” (pp. 38-39; see also Ch. 20). Pillsbury understood that attention has the aspect of a learned skill and can depend on expertise: Nearly every trade and profession has given its members a mind adapted to receiving impressions that would not be received by the great mass of men. … The acuteness of vision of the sailor. … For him every mark upon the horizon is correctly interpreted, and every small object is seen because there images in mind ready to be called out by any impression that is likely to appear there. The passenger beside him sees the same impressions, but there is nothing in the mind to favor the entrance of the important [impressions] … that it is the special training rather than the keenness of the sense that makes the difference can best be shown by repeating the test with some material for which there has been no special preparation. … Suppose a geologist and a builder to take a walk through a rocky country new to both of them. Ask each what he has seen on his return, and the replies will be as different as if they had traversed an entirely different region. (pp. 41-43)
and Each tradesman or professional man is ready to see in any object of vague outline some instrument of his daily use. … The associates which are called up … are determined by past experience … and the momentary thought of the man who observes them. (p. 125)
Proficiency level or expertise certainly implicates perceptual learning in SA. But more than just concentrated attention and more than just the ability to see things others cannot, SA involves perceptual learning of dynamic data, data that come in many forms and modes, data that suggest patterns that cannot be understood as isolated cues or even patterns, but more as what Wittgenstein called “featureless family resemblances” (see Hoffman & Fiore, 2007). The dynamic nature of situations is an aspect of the SA concept that takes us beyond the ideas put forth in previous decades of experimental psychology of attention.
Getting Inside Someone Else’s Head
The original notion of SA was expressed in the context in which a fighter pilot is trying to “get inside the head” of an opponent in a dogfight (see Endsley, 1987, 1993). The SA concept is an innovation in the psychology of attention because essentially all of the previous work on attention was focused on the context in which a single human was sensing, perceiving, and apprehending some single stimulus. The SA notion is that attention is:
awareness of one’s broad, dynamic surroundings,
the motivation to make sense of someone else’s actions and intentions, and
the need to act in context in accordance with a mental projection to the future of the actions of that other person.
This is a new idea, an expansion of concepts of attention to new contexts.
There are footnotes to this. Footnote 1 is as follows: Some of our forebears came close. James was keen on understanding how we can perceive the world around us, the totality of an event or scene, and not just individual stimuli or objects: The primordial largenesses which the sensations yield must be measured and subdivided by consciousness, and added together, before they can form by their synthesis what we know as the real Space of the objective world. In these operations, imagination, association, attention, and selection play a decisive part; and although they nowhere add any new material to the space-data of sense, they so shuffle and manipulate these data and hide present ones behind imagined ones that it is no wonder if some authors have gone so far as to think that the sensed data have no spatial worth at all, and that the intellect, since it makes the subdivisions, also gives the spatial quality to them out of resources of its own. (1890, Vol. 1, pp. 145-146)
Footnote 2 is as follows: James Sully (1897) presented a concept of synthetic attention, in which “the various ‘objects’ simultaneously grasped in attention stand in a certain relation to one another as parts of one and the same whole … they constitute features of one visible scene” (p. 89). William McDougall (1923) discussed attention not as a faculty, but as an activity of striving: Mental activity is a cyclic process, a series of cycles of activity. Each cycle begins with some cognition; the subject recognizes or thinks of some object. This evokes in him an impulse to effect some change, of only fuller cognition, more definite recognition. The striving thus brings about further cognition, which either satisfies the impulse … or fails to do so. … The cyclic character is perhaps most obvious in such an activity as thinking out the moves in a game of chess. (pp. 265-166)
Conclusion
Although some aspects of the SA concept are new, there are problems with the SA models that can only be rectified through an appreciation of fundamentals of philosophy of science and theory construction. In addition, modern researchers would do well to learn their field’s history. It is the writings of Sully and McDougall that I would most recommend to those who seek an appreciation for the richness of previous psychological thought about concepts of attention. As I hope to have shown in this essay, the historical tale is a cautionary one, reminding us that our science is by no means cumulative, and we are by no means immunized from psychologists’ fallacies by the convenient fact that we happen to be modern.
Footnotes
Robert Hoffman, PhD, is a Senior Research Scientist at IHMC, in Pensacola, Florida (
He is a recognized world leader in cognitive systems engineering and Human-Centered Computing. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, Fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Senior Member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and a Fulbright Scholar. His PhD is in experimental psychology from the University of Cincinnati, where he received McMicken Scholar, Psi Chi, and Delta Tau Kappa Honors. Following a postdoctoral associateship at the Center for Research on Human Learning at the University of Minnesota, he joined the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Psychological Studies at Adelphi University. He began his career as a psycholinguist and founded the journal Metaphor and Symbol. His subsequent research leveraged the psycholinguistics background in the study of methods for eliciting the knowledge of domain experts. He has been recognized internationally in psychology, remote sensing, human factors engineering, intelligence analysis, weather forecasting, and artificial intelligence—for his research on the psychology of expertise, the methodology of cognitive task analysis, HCC issues for intelligent systems technology, and the design of macrocognitive work systems. He is a Co-Editor for the Department on Human-Centered Computing in IEEE: Intelligent Systems. He is Editor for the book Series “Expertise: Research and Applications.” He was a cofounder of The Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making. His current research focuses on the psychology of intelligence analysis, methodological issues in the analysis of complex systems, and performance measurement for macrocognitive work systems. He has worked as a Ranger/Naturalist in the Green Mountains of Vermont and is an accomplished blues drummer. A full vita and all of his publications are available for download at 
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