Psychophysiology and high-performance cognition - a brief review of the literature
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Keywords
- cognition, flow, high-performance cognition, psychophysiology
- Copyright
- © 2015 Cowley
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. Psychophysiology and high-performance cognition - a brief review of the literature. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1373v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1373v1
Abstract
The psychophysiological method can be used to detect some simple cognitive states such as arousal, attentiveness, or mental workload. This approach can be especially interesting when cognition has some productive purpose, as in knowledge work, and tends to be related to human-computer interaction (HCI). However more interesting for applied purposes are acts of coordinated high-level cognition. High- level (or higher-order) cognition (HLC) is typically associated with decision making, problem solving, and executive control of cognition and action. Further, an intuitive approach for assessing whether someone is engaged in HLC is to measure their performance of a known task. Given this, it is reasonable to define high-performance cognition (HPC) as HLC under some performance restriction, such as real-time pressure or expert skill level. Such states are also interesting for HCI in work, and their detection represents an ambitious aim for using the psychophysiological method. We report a brief review of the literature on the topic.
Author Comment
This brief review is intended as a foundation on which to build a more complete synopsis of the theoretical state of the art for defining high performance cognition, and options for detecting it. This preprint submission has not been published elsewhere but may be in the future.