Overview of the DARPA augmented cognition technical integration experiment

The Defense Advance Research Projects Agency Augmented Cognition program is developing innovative technologies that will transform human-computer interactions by making information systems adapt to the changing capabilities and limitations of the user. The first phase of the Augmented Cognition program was to empirically assess the ability of various psychophysiological measures to identify changes in human cognitive activity during task performance in real time. This overview describes the empirical results of a Technical Integration Experiment involving the evaluation of 20 psychophysiological measures from 11 different research groups, including functional Near Infrared imaging, continuous and event-related electrical encephalography, pupil dilation, mouse pressure, body posture, heart rate, and galvanic skin response. These cognitive state gauges were evaluated on a common, quasi-realistic, military command and control task called the Warship Commander Task. Participants monitored aircraft on a geographical display for their levels of threat and responded to the threatening ones, as they simultaneously monitored ship communications for ship status information. The task involves a combination of perceptual, motor, spatial, auditory, verbal, memory, and decision-making processing. Task load was manipulated by changing the quantity and types of aircraft appearing throughout the primary task and by varying the presence or absence of the secondary verbal-memory task. Eleven of the gauges significantly identified changes in cognitive activity during the task. This overview summarizes the results and examines the prospects for the successful transition of these cognitive state gauges to operational military human-machine systems.