Cognitive Task Analysis

This chapter presents an overview of the current state of cognitive task analysis (CTA) in research and practice. CTA uses a variety of interview and observation strategies to capture a description of the explicit and implicit knowledge that experts use to perform complex tasks. The captured knowledge is most often transferred to training or the development of expert systems. The first section presents descriptions of a variety of CTA techniques, their common characteristics, and the typical strategies used to elicit knowledge from experts and other sources. The second section describes research on the impact of CTA and synthesizes a number of studies and reviews pertinent to issues underlying knowledge elicitation. In the third section, we discuss the integration of CTA with training design. Finally, in the fourth section, we present a number of recommendations for future research and conclude with general comments.