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Perspectives on Cognitive Task Analysis

Historical Origins and Modern Communities of Practice

• By Robert R. Hoffman, Laura G. Militello

Price: $80.00add to cart

• Price: $80.00
• Binding: Hardback
• Pages: 304
• Published by: Psychology Press (formerly published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates)
• Publication Date: 1st August 2008 (Available for Pre-order)
• ISBN: 978-0-8058-6140-2

About the Book

This volume is the first comprehensive history of task analysis, charting its origins from the earliest applied psychology through to modern forms of task analysis that focus on the study of cognitive work. Through this detailed historical analysis, it is made apparent how task analysis has always been cognitive.

Chapters cover the histories, key ideas, and contributions to methodology of a number of communities of practice, including: Sociotechnics, European Work Analysis, Naturalistic Decision Making, Cognitive Systems Engineering, Ethnography, Human Factors. Further, integrative chapters focus on the purposes of cognitive task analysis.

It is shown how all the various communities of practice are living in the same scientific universe, though are in many ways distinctive in terms of their key concerns and main theories. It is a historiography of task analysis, and the people who invented task analysis. It is also an explanatory primer on what cognitive task analysis is all about and what it can do.

Perspectives on Cognitive Task Analyis will be of value to professionals in allied disciplines who might come to rely on cognitive task analysis in their system development programs. It will be invaluable to students who need to know what task analysis and cognitive task analysis are really all about. For practitioners of cognitive task analysis, this volume is a major presentation of what their scientific universe is all about.

Table of Contents

Part 1: History. 1. Introduction to Section 1: History. 2. A History of Task Analysis. 3. Evolution of Task Analysis into Cognitive Task Analysis: From Time and Motion Studies to "Man-Machine Systems". 4. Defining and Bounding Cognitive Task Analysis. 5. Emergence of the Communities of Practice. Part 2: The "Perspectives". 6. Introduction to Section 2: The "Perspectives". 7. Cognitive Systems Engineering. 8. Expertise Studies. 9. Naturalistic Decision Making. 10. Work Analysis. 11. Sociological and Ethnographic Perspectives. 12. Human-Centered Computing. Part 3: Synthesis. 13: Introduction to Section 3: Synthesis. 14. Synthesis: Divergences of the Perspectives. 15: Synthesis: Convergences of the Perspectives. 16. Synthesis: Convergence on The Topic of Teamwork and Team Cognition. 17. Synthesis: Methodological Challenges for Cognitive Task Analysis.