Integration of Behavior Moderators into Cognitive Performance Models for Assessing Cognitive Readiness

"This proposal to the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Science & Technology describes an innovative approach to advancing the modeling, simulation and analysis of human cognition. Until now, two orthogonal conceptions have underpinned the modeling andsimulation of human cognition; one focuses on the mental workload that defines cognitive performance, while the other emphasizes the content of the cognition itself at a symbolic level. Both approaches have merit and both have become valuables tool intheir own right for modeling and simulating isolated aspects of human performance. They are, however, stand-alone approaches and as such they lack the necessary integration to represent the combined impacts of workload on cognitive processes. We proposethe connection that will make such an integration possible so that, for the first time, it should be possible to predict the impact of workload on the "thought process" of a synthetic agent. The proposed work will not only improve the realism and fidelityof human behavior, but it will reconcile two distinct theoretical traditions. As the needs and uses of human behavior models increase, so does the need for models that realistically represent actual human behavior. By integrating cognitive models andworkload models, the user community will acquire an architecture and a tool that will advance the state of the art for both the assessment of cognitive readiness and for the detailed predi