Supervisory control in a dynamic and uncertain environment: a process model of skilled human-environment interaction

An understanding of how both psychological and environmental factors mutually constrain skilled behavior is required to effectively support human activity. As a step toward meeting this need, a process model of skilled human interaction with a dynamic and uncertain environment is presented. The model was able to mimic human behavior in a laboratory task requiring oneand two-person crews to direct the activities of a fleet of agents to locate and process valued objects in a simulated world. Reflective of the need to explicitly consider both environmental and cognitive influences on behavior, the process model is a pair of’ highly interactive components that together mimic the behavior of the human-environment system. One component is a representation of the external environment as a dynamically changing set of opportunities for action. This environmental component is based on the ecological viewpoint that relations indicating the match between the human’s capacity for action, and actions made available by the environmental structure, should serve as primitives in the description of the environment for the skilled performer. The second component is a dynamic representation of skilled human decisionmaking and planning behavior within the environment so described. Modeling both human and environment in an integrated fashion allowed for a description of behavior as being mutually influenced by the external environmental structure and an internal priority structure over available actions. Sensitivity to environmental structure ensured that action selection opportunistically exploited the dynamic possibilities for action afforded by the external situation, whereas the priority structure ensured that action selection was also consistent with task goals. The process model is an expression of a general theory of skilled interaction assuming that perception and action mechanisms sensitive to environmental constraints are responsible for generating much of behavior, and where the need for additional cognitive processing of internal representations (e.& problem-space search, multiple option comparison) may result from environmental designs that do not adequately support the perceptual guidance of activity. Manuscript received July 16, 1991; revised November 6, 1992. Portions of this paper are based on the Ph.D. Dissertation of the first author. Portions of the work were presented at the 1989 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, the Tkenty-Third Annual Conference on Manual Control, June 1988, and the 1990 Spring Meeting of the International Society for Ecological Psychology. This work was supported by NASA Ames Grant NAG2-195 to Ohio State University. A. Kirlik is with the Center for Human-Machine Systems Research, School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332. R. A. Miller is with the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210. R. J. Jagacinski is with the Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210. IEEE Log Number 9207504.