Cognitive Control Dynamics for Reaching a Satisficing Performance in Complex Dynamic Situations

The study of dynamic situations, in which the human operator can exert only partial control (such as in industrial process control, aircraft piloting, or air traffic control), has offered rare opportunities to examine the dynamics of cognitive control. Unlike most of the laboratory approaches to the study of cognition, this kind of study has stressed that several cognitive modes can act in parallel and that the distribution of control among the modes can evolve over time in relation to task requirements and human operator states. This article is a review of the arguments, developed in the literature on dynamic situations and by the authors themselves, in favor of a dynamic adjustment of cognitive control to situational features (integrating both the environment and the human) as a major component of adaptation. The main criterion used by the human operator to adjust cognitive control is situation mastery, as a guarantee that a satisficing performance will be reached with an acceptable quantity of resources. Two main dimensions are proposed to characterize cognitive control modes: the level of abstraction (symbolic/subsymbolic) and the origin (internal-anticipative, external-reactive) of the data used for control. Metacognition is considered as a means to distribute the cognitive control within these dimensions in order to ensure situation mastery. Theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of this perspective on cognitive control dynamics are drawn. From a theoretical viewpoint, the approach stresses the need to consider the cognitive system degrees of freedom to adapt to situations, and that therefore several solutions are possible in order to perform the same task. On the methodological side, the access to the diverse cognitive control modes, to their parallelism, and to the cognitive control dynamics requires new methodological approaches. The practical implications consist in developing support systems that keep the degrees of freedom open for adaptation and in trying to manage consistency.