Overview of the DARPA Augmented Cognition Technical Integration Experiment

The DARPA Augmented Cognition program is developing technologies to make information systems sensitive to the capabilities and limitations of the human component of the human-machine system. By taking better advantage of individual human capabilities, and being sensitive to human limitations, it is expected that overall system performance can be improved. There have been many recent advances in understanding human decision-making, and the Augmented Cognition program is taking advantage of them. The technologies developed in measuring brain activity and various facets of cognition are serving as the basis for managing the way information is presented to the human operators of complex systems. The Augmented Cognition program is building demonstrable, quantifiable augmentations to human cognitive ability in realistic operational environments. The first phase of the Augmented Cognition program was to empirically assess the utility and validity of various psychophysiological measures in dynamically identifying changes in human cognitive activity as decision-makers engaged in cognitive tasks. This report describes the results of a Technical Integration Experiment (TIE) involving the evaluation of 20 psychophysiologically derived measures (cognitive state gauges). The TIE brought these disparate approaches together to be assessed with a common test protocol. This task was developed specifically to meet the needs of assessing these very different gauges with necessary empirical controls, yet still maintain the essential character of those tasks from a cognitive perspective. Eleven of the gauges successfully identified changes in cognitive activity during the task. This report also describes the integration of individual gauge technologies into suites of gauges to simultaneously measure multiple cognitive indices, and the issues created with sensor technology integration in developing next-generation cognitive state gauges. This report summarizes the results from the TIE.