The Effects of Task Structure on Cognitive Organizing Principles: Implications for Complex Display Design Practices

Cognitive engineering practices provide display design solutions that enhance the operator's ability to manage and control complex systems. However, they often do so without adequate modeling of the cognitive system requirements for this process. This research report is a first in a series of reports illustrating, in part, that the depth and surface distinctions of a task influence the correspondence between cognitive information organizing principles and properties of the task. The congruence principle is offered as a potential explanatory mechanism for the findings that different task representations induce different cognitive organizing principles, and that performance is dependent, in part, upon the mapping between the task, display, and cognitive organizing principle of the operator. Using different display types as means of comparison, results of both Experiment 1 and 2 supported the hypothesized congruence principle.