Cognitive Resilience: Reflection-in-action and on-action

Abstract

Identifying cognitive strategies that people use to support resilient performance
has rarely been the focus of experimental work. Our experiments have found that the pervasiveness
of failures during human computer interaction can be recognized by individuals,
but underlying cognitive and attentional causes cannot. Understanding how individuals recover
from failure and adapt to new environmental demands can be studied in the laboratory,
however, this requires a paradigmatic shift away from developing traditional ?single
cause? explanations. Previous research has strongly suggested that individuals are reliant
on ?bottom-up? cues from the environment when planning future actions. By systematically
manipulating factors that influence an individual?s awareness of environmental cues, work
reported in this paper has revealed some novel insights. Resilient individuals are able to
spontaneously generate new strategies in-action that support response to regular disturbances.
Furthermore when provided with a ?window of opportunity? to reflect-on-action,
individuals can rehearse future actions so that the influence of any residual strain (or load)
can be mitigated against (feedforward strategy). Further work on understanding strategies
adopted by resilient individuals may facilitate the development of systems that explicitly
support cognitive resilience.