Human Error as an Emergent Property of Action Selection and Task Place-Holding.

Objective: A computational process model could explain how the dynamic interaction of human cognitive mechanisms produces each of multiple error types.

Background: With increasing capability and complexity of technological systems, the potential severity of consequences of human error is magnified. Interruption greatly increases people's error rates, as does the presence of other information to maintain in an active state.

Spatial reasoning with multiple intrinsic frames of reference.

Establishing and updating spatial relationships between objects in the environment is vital to maintaining situation awareness and supporting many socio-spatial tasks. In a complex environment, people often need to utilize multiple reference systems that are intrinsic to different objects (intrinsic frame of reference, IFOR), but these IFORs may conflict with each other in one or more ways. Current spatial cognition theories do not adequately address how people handle multi-IFOR reasoning problems.

Planning in sentence production: evidence for the phrase as a default planning scope.

Controversy remains as to the scope of advanced planning in language production. Smith and Wheeldon (1999) found significantly longer onset latencies when subjects described moving-picture displays by producing sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase than for matched sentences beginning with a simple noun phrase. While these findings are consistent with a phrasal scope of planning, they might also be explained on the basis of: (1) greater retrieval fluency for the second content word in the simple initial noun phrase sentences and (2) visual grouping factors.