The Cognitive Engineering Perspective

Instead of the human being conceptualized as a passive system element, to be treated in the same way as a pump or valve, the cognitive approach emphasizes the fact that people impose meaning on the information they receive, and their actions are almost always directed to achieving some explicit or implicit goal. 

The cognitive approach has had a major influence in recent years on how human error is treated in systems such as chemical process plants and nuclear power generation. In the next section we shall describe some of the key concepts that have emerged from this work, and how they apply to the analysis of error in the CPI. Discussion of the cognitive view of human performance are contained in Reason (1990), Hollnagel (1993), Kantowitz and Fujita (1990), Hollnagel and Woods (1983), and Woods and Roth (1990). 

Explaining and Classifying Errors from the Cognitive Perspective 

For example, consider the error of a worker closing valve B instead of the nearby valve A, which is the required action as set out in the procedures. There are at least five possible explanations for this error. 

The worker may have misheard instructions issued by the supervisor and thought that valve B was the required valve. Possible cause communications failure giving rise to a mistaken intention. 

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If a definition of who the Danish chemists were in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is to be based on the distribution of the membership groups of the Danish Chemical Society, pharmacist or chemical engineer is a very accurate answer. But if one focuses instead on the lecture programme of the society, one gets the image of a group of people with an exclusive interest in the cognitive aspects of pure chemistry. There was, however, no built-in conflict between the two perspectives, as I have demonstrated. 

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