Skip to main content

Advertisement

Springer Nature Link
Log in

How a cockpit forgets speeds (and speed-related events): toward a kinetic description of joint cognitive systems

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Cognition, Technology & Work Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Two seminal papers investigating the cognition involved in navigating modern, multi-crew aircraft developed a joint cognitive system approach while focusing on how a cockpit calculates and remembers speed (Henriqson et al. in Cogn Technol Work 13:217–231, 2011; Hutchins in Cogn Sci 19(3):265–288, 1995b). Although the joint cognitive systems approach constituted an advance over more traditional approaches focusing on individual pilot performances, both fall short of describing the cockpit joint cognitive system. Based on extensive ethnographic data—including recorded modified think-aloud protocols, debriefing sessions following (recorded) simulator biannual simulator assessments, and simulator performances followed by stimulated recall using simulator recordings—we show that a considerable amount of flying involves bodily and embodied knowledge sequentially and temporally organized in flows (kinetic melodies). These become apparent when pilots are asked to fly multiple aircraft (mixed-fleet flying), where the flow patterns from one cockpit are triggered in a physically and cognitively different cockpit. Focusing on embodied flows (kinetic melodies) allows us to highlight how cockpits forget speeds and how they fail to calculate the required speeds and speed-related events.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7

Similar content being viewed by others

Explore related subjects

Discover the latest articles and news from researchers in related subjects, suggested using machine learning.

Notes

  1. Anglo-Saxon studies of gestures have adopted the French adjective “ergotique” (Cadoz 1994) pertaining to movements that produce work by means of the English “ergotic” (e.g., Roth 2003).

  2. In interaction, the cognitive agents are theorized independently with flow moving back and forth between them, whereas in transaction, the agents are interdependent such that they cannot be specified independently (e.g., von Uexküll 1973; van Gelder 1998). In mathematical terms, the interactional approach affords a separation of variables of a dynamical system modeled by sets of differential equations, whereas the transactional approach does not afford a separation of variables, because the definition of one always involves the definition of all others.

  3. Every dimension of the larger study was approved by a university ethics committee, the participating industry partners, and the labor unions. Assurances were provided that participation/non-participation did not affect job status; and participating pilots were given the opportunity to opt out of the study (entailing deletion of their data).

  4. VMO—maximum operating speed.

  5. In this case, a landing is aborted, requiring the aircraft to climb to a specific elevation and location in airspace.

  6. The electronic horizontal situation indicator (EHSI) provides information on the horizontal positioning of the aircraft. It does so in the ROSE mode, which display a compass rose, or the ARC mode, which, in MAP selection, displays the location of the aircraft on a map.

  7. Flight director (FD)—an instrument operating together with the attitude indicator that tells pilots the attitude required to follow a chosen flight path.

  8. IAS mode—the flight director is used with desired indicated air speed.

  9. VS mode—the flight director is used with desired vertical speed.

  10. If speed moves outside of the V REF + 20 kt range, then a go-around must be flown.

  11. MCDU—the multifunction control display unit is part of the flight management system providing access to the global navigation satellite system (GNSS). It is used, for example, to program the route from one to another airport by means of waypoints.

  12. In modern aircraft, pilots program their route by means of waypoints, specific points they have to pass that have specific horizontal and vertical coordinates.

  13. During an engine failure, “uptrim” will move the remaining engine from 90 % to full torque (100 %); autofeathering automatically moves the propeller pitch of the malfunctioning engine into a position that minimizes drag.

  14. Dividing by 2 (taking half) and then multiplying by 10 is a typical practical strategy that makes mental calculation easier than a multiplication by 5 (e.g. Lave 1988). The strategy corresponds to those found in other workplaces, where simply multipliers are used to replace trigonometric functions such as in the geometry of electrician’s conduit bending practices (e.g. Roth 2012a).

  15. VmHB0—minimum speed (Vm) when HIGH BANK is selected and flaps set to 0. This is the speed that gives the best climb rate with flaps set at 0.

  16. If the current speed V > V 2 + 5 kt, the aircraft would have actually slowed down to maintain the speed for maximum climb rate.

  17. If it were just a matter of schemas, then the movements of a Tiger Woods and those of a hobby golfer should be the same as long as they have the same schemas.

References

  • Agre P, Horswill I (1997) Lifeworld analysis. J Artif Intell Res 6:111–145

    Google Scholar 

  • Ballard DH, Hayhoe MM, Pook PK, Rao RPN (1997) Deictic codes for the embodiment of cognition. Behav Brain Sci 20(4):723–767

    Google Scholar 

  • Basden A (2011) Towards lifeworld-oriented information systems development. In: Isomaki H, Pekkola S (eds) Reframing humans in information systems development. Springer, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Basden A, Klein HK (2008) New research directions for data and knowledge engineering: a philosophy of language approach. Data Knowl Eng 67(2):260–285

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bourdieu P (1980) Le sens pratique. Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris

  • Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses (2012) Final report on the accident on 1st June 2009 to the Airbus A330-203 registered F-GZCP operated by Air France flight AF 447 Rio de Janeiro—Paris. Ministère de l’Écologie. du Dévéloppement durable, des Transports et du Logement, Paris

    Google Scholar 

  • Cadoz C (1994) Les réalités virtuelles. Flammarion, Paris

    Google Scholar 

  • Chapman D (1991) Vision, instruction, and action. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Clark A (1999) An embodied cognitive science. Trends Cogn Sci 3(9):345–351

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Decety J, Grèzes J (2006) The power of simulation: imagining one’s own and other’s behavior. Brain Res 1079:4–14

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dreyfus HL (2007a) Being-in-the-world: a commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time Division I. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Dreyfus HL (2007b) Why Heideggerian AI failed and how fixing it would require making it more Heideggerian. Artif Intell 171:1137–1160

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gibson JJ (1979) The ecological approach to visual perception. Houghton-Mifflin, Boston

    Google Scholar 

  • Heidegger M (1996) Being and time. State University of New York Press, Albany

    Google Scholar 

  • Held R, Hein A (1963) Movement-produced stimulation in the development of visually guided behavior. J Comp Physiol Psychol 56:872–876

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Henriqson E, van Winsen R, Saurin TA, Dekker SWA (2011) How a cockpit calculates its speeds and why errors while doing this are so hard to detect. Cogn Technol Work 13:217–231

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Henry M (2000) Incarnation: Une phénoménologie de la chair. Éditions du Seuil, Paris

    Google Scholar 

  • Husserl E (1982) Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Husserl E (1991) On the phenomenology of the consciousness of internal time. Kluwer, Dordrecht

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Husserl E (2008) Husserliana gesammelte werke band XXXIX: die lebenswelt. Springer, Dordrecht

    Google Scholar 

  • Hutchins E (1995a) Cognition in the wild. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Hutchins E (1995b) How a cockpit remembers its speeds. Cogn Sci 19(3):265–288

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jensen MS, Yao R, Street WN, Simons DJ (2011) Change blindness and inattentional blindness. WIREs Cogn Sci 2:529–546

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kirsh D (1995) The intelligent use of space. Artif Intell 73:31–68

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kirsh D, Maglio P (1994) On distinguishing epistemic from pragmatic action. Cogn Sci 18(4):513–549

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Klein G, Woods DD, Bradshaw J, Hoffman RR, Feltovich PJ (2004) Ten challenges for making automation a “Team Player” in joint human–agent activity. IEEE Intell Syst 19(6):91–95

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lave J (1988) Cognition in practice: mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Leont’ev AN (1978) Activity, consciousness, personality. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs

  • Leont’ev AN (1981) Problems of the development of mind. Sharp, Armonk

  • Luria AR (1968) The mind of a mnemonist. Basic Books, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Luria AR (1973) The working brain: an introduction to neuropsychology. Basic Books, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Luria AR (1979) The making of mind: a person account of Soviet psychology. Harvard University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Lyons DM, Hendriks AJ (1995) Exploiting patterns of interaction to achieve reactive behavior. Artif Intell 73:117–148

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Maine de Biran P (1859) Œuvres inédites. Dezobry et Magdeleine, Paris

    Google Scholar 

  • Merleau-Ponty M (1945) Phénoménologie de la perception. Gallimard, Paris

    Google Scholar 

  • Moriarty G, Julliard Y (2001) On subjectivity in focal engineering. In: International symposium on ISTAS’01 proceedings of the international symposium on technology and society. IEEE Computer Society, Washington

  • Norman D (1988) The design of everyday things. Basic Books, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Payr S (2001) The virtual other: aspects of social interaction with synthetic characters. Appl Artif Intell 15(6):493–519

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ricœur P (2004) Memory, history, forgetting. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Rizzolatti G, Fadiga L, Fogassi L, Gallese V (1997) The space around us. Science 277:190–191

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Roth WM (2003) From epistemic (ergotic) actions to scientific discourse: do gestures obtain a bridging function? Pragmat Cogn 11:139–168

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Roth WM (2012a) Rules of bending, bending the rules: the geometry of conduit bending in college and workplace. Educ Stud Math. doi:10.1007/s10649-011-9376-4

    Google Scholar 

  • Roth WM (2012b) Tracking the origins of signs in mathematical activity: a material phenomenological approach. In: Bockarova M, Danesi M, Núñez (eds) Cognitive science and interdisciplinary approaches to mathematical cognition. Lincom Europa, Munich

    Google Scholar 

  • Roth WM, Jornet AG (2013) Situated cognition. WIREs Cogn Sci 4(5):463–478

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sheets-Johnstone M (2009) Animation: the fundamental, essential, and properly descriptive concept. Cont Philos Rev 42(3):375–400

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sheets-Johnstone M (2011) The primacy of movement (expanded, 2) edn. John Benjamins, Amsterdam

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • van Gelder T (1997) Dynamics and cognition. In: Haugeland J (ed) Mind design II. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • van Gelder T (1998) The dynamical hypothesis in cognitive science. Behav Brain Sci 21(5):616–665

    Google Scholar 

  • von Uexküll J (1973) Theoretische Biologie. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt

    Google Scholar 

  • Vygotsky LS (1986) Thought and language. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Wheeler M (2005) Reconstructing the cognitive world: the next step. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Wittgenstein L (1997) Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical investigations, 2nd edn. Blackwell, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Woods DD, Hollnagel E (2006) Joint cognitive systems: patterns in cognitive systems engineering. Taylor & Francis, Boca Raton

    Book  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Applied Cognitive Science, MacLaurin Building A567, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, V8P 5C2, Canada

    Wolff-Michael Roth

  2. Griffith Institute of Educational Research, Griffith University, Mt. Gravatt, QLD, 4022, Australia

    Timothy J. Mavin

  3. Mt. Cook Airlines, Christchurch, New Zealand

    Ian Munro

Authors
  1. Wolff-Michael Roth
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  2. Timothy J. Mavin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  3. Ian Munro
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wolff-Michael Roth.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Roth, WM., Mavin, T.J. & Munro, I. How a cockpit forgets speeds (and speed-related events): toward a kinetic description of joint cognitive systems. Cogn Tech Work 17, 279–299 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-014-0292-0

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-014-0292-0

Keywords