Cognitive Elements of Human Decision Making

This chapter presents some understandings of the human problemsolving activity that a group of researchers in the Collaborative Agent Design Research Center at the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, California has gained over the past two decades. Based on the premise that the human decision-maker should be an integral component of any computer-based decision-support system, it follows that the elements that appear to be important to the user should be incorporated in the design of these systems. The complexity of the human cognitive system is evidenced by the large body of literature that describes problem-solving behavior and the relatively fewer writings that attempt to provide comprehensive explanations of this behavior. The contributions of this chapter are confined to the identification of important elements of the problemsolving activity and exploration of how these elements might influence the design of a decision-support system.