Cognitive Resilience: Reflection-In-Action and On-Action

Identifying cognitive strategies that people use to support resilient performance has rarely been the focus of experimental work. Our experiments have found that the pervasiveness of failures during human computer interaction can be recognized by individuals, but underlying cognitive and attentional causes cannot. Understanding how individuals recover from failure and adapt to new environmental demands can be studied in the laboratory, however, this requires a paradigmatic shift away from developing traditional ‘single cause’ explanations. Previous research has strongly suggested that individuals are reliant on ‘bottom-up’ cues from the environment when planning future actions. By systematically manipulating factors that influence an individual’s awareness of environmental cues, work reported in this paper has revealed some novel insights. Resilient individuals are able to spontaneously generate new strategies in-action that support response to regular disturbances. Furthermore when provided with a ‘window of opportunity’ to reflect-on-action, individuals can rehearse future actions so that the influence of any residual strain (or load) can be mitigated against (feedforward strategy). Further work on understanding strategies adopted by resilient individuals may facilitate the development of systems that explicitly support cognitive resilience.