Working Minds by Beth Crandall

Working Minds by Beth Crandall

Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) helps researchers understand how cognitive skills and strategies make it possible for people to act effectively and get things done. CTA can yield information people need-employers faced with personnel issues, market researchers who want to understand the thought processes of consumers, trainers and others who design instructional systems, health care professionals who want to apply lessons learned from errors and accidents, systems analysts developing user specifications, and many other professionals. CTA can show what makes the workplace work-and what keeps it from working as well as it might.

Working Minds is a true handbook, offering a set of tools for doing CTA: methods for collecting data about cognitive processes and events, analyzing them, and communicating them effectively. It covers both the "why" and the "how" of CTA methods, providing examples, guidance, and stories from the authors' own experiences as CTA practitioners. Because effective use of CTA depends on some conceptual grounding in cognitive theory and research-on knowing what a cognitive perspective can offer-the book also offers an overview of current research on cognition.

The book provides detailed guidance for planning and carrying out CTA, with chapters on capturing knowledge and capturing the way people reason. It discusses studying cognition in real-world settings and the challenges of rapidly changing technology. And it describes key issues in applying CTA findings in a variety of fields. Working Minds makes the methodology of CTA accessible and the skills involved attainable.

Raechel Bianchetti received her doctoral degree from the Pennsylvania State University. Her doctoral research explored the cognitive processes and knowledge that facilitate remote sensing image interpretation and the use of geovisual analytic approaches to facilitate insight generation from imagery. Prior to that, she studied remote sensing at the University of Idaho for a variety of physical science applications including geological mapping on Mars and forests in Idaho.

Robert R. Hoffman, Ph.D. is a Senior Research Scientist, IHMC, Pensacola FL. Hoffman is a recognized world leader in cognitive systems engineering, Expertise Studies, 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. He has been Principal Investigator, Co-Principal Investigator, Principal Scientist, Senior Research Scientist, Principal Author, or Principle Subcontractor on over 60 grants and contracts totaling nearly $12M. He has led efforts including large, multi-partner, multi-year grant collaborations, contracted alliances of university and private sector partners, and multi-university research initiatives. His Ph.D. 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 pioneered the study of methods for eliciting the knowledge of domain experts. Hoffman has been recognized internationally in psychology, remote sensing, human factors engineering, 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 cognitive work systems. Hoffman 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 co-founder of The Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making.